We study appointment scheduling problems in continuous time. A finite number of clients are scheduled such that a function of the waiting time of clients, the idle time of the server, and the lateness of the schedule is minimized. The optimal schedule is notoriously hard to derive within...

In service systems, in order to balance the server’s idle times and the customers’ waiting times, one may fix the arrival times of the customers beforehand in an appointment schedule. We propose a procedure for determining appointment schedules in such a D/G/1-type of system by sequentially...