Utility‐Based Appointment Scheduling in Continuous Time: The Lag Order Approximation Method
Summary
An appointment schedule aims to achieve a proper balance between different
interests: the waiting time for the customers and the waiting time
for the service providers, the so called idle time. These interests are truly
conflicting; focusing on small idle time results in large waiting times for
the customer and vice versa. This thesis considers the area of appointment
scheduling for a single server in continuous time with punctual customers.
There is a vast amount of literature addressing this topic, however, there is
not a generic approach to generate large schedules analytically with general
service time distributions. First, we study the characteristics of this problem
with exponential service times. Next, we propose an approximation method
that enables us to design appointment schedules with general service time
distributions. This method is the lag order approximation method, which is
the main result of this thesis. Another method is proposed to overcome the
dimensionality problem, when designing appointment schedules for a large
number of customers. We will present both methods, and investigate their
performance and applicability.