Adaptive scheduling in service systems: A Dynamic programming approach
研究了在每次客户到达时可调整未来所有客户排程的自适应调度问题，基于动态规划方法处理不同服务时间分布，并通过数值实验展示动态调度的优势。
This paper considers appointment scheduling in a setting in which at every client arrival the schedule of all future clients can be adapted. Starting our analysis with an explicit treatment of the case of exponentially distributed service times, we then develop a phase-type-based approach to also cover cases in which the service times’ squared coefficient of variation differs from 1. The approach relies on dynamic programming, with the state information being the number of clients waiting, the elapsed service time of the client in service, and the number of clients still to be scheduled. The use of dynamic schedules is illustrated through a set of numerical experiments, showing (i) the effect of wrongly assuming exponentially distributed service times, and (ii) the gains (over static schedules, that is) achieved by rescheduling.