Appointment window scheduling with wait-dependent abandonment for elective inpatient admission
提出一种预约窗口调度方法，通过告知患者入院窗口而非具体时间，显著减少患者因等待而放弃的事件和提前离开，同时轻微提升服务器利用率，尤其适用于系统过载和患者对在线等待更敏感的场景。
In this study, we propose a new appointment window scheduling (AWS) approach of informing customers of an admission window (AW) rather than the traditional appointment time. We provide a formal description of this AWS problem for only one kind of customer and propose a dedicated chance-constrained policy to assign AWs dynamically under the condition with fixed service capacity, different scales as well as status in different waiting stages, and wait-dependent abandonment. Numerical experiments show that customer satisfaction can be significantly improved (by reducing over 60% of wait-but-abandon events and by reducing 90% of departures caused by waiting beyond the AW), and server utilisation is slightly improved. And the improvements are more significant when systems are overloaded, and customers are more sensitive to online waiting than offline waiting. The AWS scenario can also be applied to other queueing systems as long as it is possible and profitable to let customers wait outside of the waiting area.