文章基本信息

标题：Robust Appointment Scheduling
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作者：Shashi Mittal ; Andreas S. Schulz ; Sebastian Stiller 等
期刊名称：LIPIcs : Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics
电子版ISSN：1868-8969
出版年度：2014
卷号：28
页码：356-370
DOI：10.4230/LIPIcs.APPROX-RANDOM.2014.356
出版社：Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum fuer Informatik
摘要：Health care providers are under tremendous pressure to reduce costs and increase quality of their services. It has long been recognized that well-designed appointment systems have the potential to improve utilization of expensive personnel and medical equipment and to reduce waiting times for patients. In a widely influential survey on outpatient scheduling, Cayirli and Veral (2003) concluded that the "biggest challenge for future research will be to develop easy-to-use heuristics." We analyze the appointment scheduling problem from a robust-optimization perspective, and we establish the existence of a closed-form optimal solution--arguably the simplest and best `heuristic' possible. In case the order of patients is changeable, the robust optimization approach yields a novel formulation of the appointment scheduling problem as that of minimizing a concave function over a supermodular polyhedron. We devise the first constant-factor approximation algorithm for this case.
关键词：Robust Optimization; Health Care Scheduling; Approximation Algorithms