Managing Appointment Booking Under Customer Choices

Content Provider	Scilit
Author	Liu, Nan van de Ven, Peter Zhang, Bo
Copyright Year	2017
Description	Journal: SSRN Electronic Journal Motivated by the increasing use of online appointment booking platforms, we study how to offer appointment slots to customers in order to maximize the total number of slots booked. We develop two models, non-sequential offering and sequential offering, to capture different types of interactions between customers and the scheduling system. In these two models, the scheduler offers either a single set of appointment slots for the arriving customer to choose from, or multiple sets in sequence, respectively. For the non-sequential model, we identify a static randomized policy which is asymptotically optimal when the system demand and capacity increase simultaneously, and we further show that offering all available slots at all times has a constant factor of 2 performance guarantee. For the sequential model, we derive a closed-form optimal policy for a large class of instances and develop a simple, effective heuristic for those instances without an explicit optimal policy. By comparing these two models, our study generates useful operational insights for improving the current appointment booking processes. In particular, our analysis reveals an interesting equivalence between the sequential offering model and the non-sequential offering model with perfect customer preference information. This equivalence allows us to apply sequential offering in a wide range of interactive scheduling contexts. Our extensive numerical study shows that sequential offering can significantly improve the slot fill rate (6-8% on average and up to 18% in our testing cases) compared to non-sequential offering.
Related Links	https://ir.cwi.nl/pub/28888/28888.pdf https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm?abstractid=3157060
ISSN	10914358
e-ISSN	15565068
DOI	10.2139/ssrn.3157060
Journal	SSRN Electronic Journal
Language	English
Publisher	Elsevier BV
Publisher Date	2017-12-20
Access Restriction	Open
Subject Keyword	Journal: SSRN Electronic Journal Operations Research and Management Science Service Operations Management Customer Choice Appointment Scheduling Markov Decision Process Asymptotically Optimal Policy
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health Psychiatry and Mental Health