Staffing a service system with appointment-based customer arrivals
Appointment systems are widely used to facilitate customers’ access to services in many industries such as healthcare. A number of studies have taken a queueing approach to analyse service systems and facilitate managerial decisions on staffing requirements by assuming independent and stationary customer arrivals. This paper is motivated by the observation that the queueing-based method shows relatively poor performance when customers arrive according to their appointment times. Because customer arrivals are dependent on their appointment times, this study, unlike queueing-based methods, conducts a detailed analysis of appointment-based customer arrivals instead of making steady-state assumptions. We develop a new model that captures the characteristics of appointment-based customer arrivals and computes the probability of transient system states. Through the use of this model, which relaxes stationary and independent assumptions, we propose a heuristic algorithm that determines staffing requirements with aims to minimizing staff-hours while satisfying a target service level. The simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the queueing-based method.
Year of publication: |
2014
|
---|---|
Authors: | Chung, Kwanghun ; Min, Daiki |
Published in: |
Journal of the Operational Research Society. - Palgrave Macmillan, ISSN 0160-5682. - Vol. 65.2014, 10, p. 1533-1543
|
Publisher: |
Palgrave Macmillan |
Saved in:
Online Resource
Saved in favorites
Similar items by person
-
Staffing a service system with appointment-based customer arrivals
Chung, Kwanghun, (2014)
-
Strong valid inequalities for orthogonal disjunctions and polynomial covering sets
Tawarmalani, Mohit, (2008)
-
Lifted inequalities for 0-1 mixed-integer bilinear covering sets
Chung, Kwanghun, (2011)
- More ...