A novel and efficient real-time sequencing strategy for appointment scheduling with unpunctual patients

No-shows and non-punctual appointments have always been uncertain factors faced by managers of service-oriented enterprises and institutions, which usually lead to a low utilization rate of resources and a rapid decline in service satisfaction. Taking clinics as an example, this paper proposes a novel and efficient real-time sequencing strategy to minimize the cost associated with patient waiting time, provider idle time and overtime considering no-shows and unpunctuality. Four types of patient waiting time are considered for the first time, based on which the developed real-time sequencing strategy is used for scheduling the waiting patients when the provider becomes idle. Then, a biased random-key genetic algorithm is adopted to determine the number of patients on appointment slots and the length of each appointment slot. Extensive computational experiments show that the derived real-time sequencing strategy achieves a significant cost reduction compared with the famous FCFS (first come first served) and the state-of-art LAR (the larger of appointment time and real arrival time) rules.