Dynamic appointment scheduling with patient time preferences and different service time lengths

Advance admission scheduling in the field of health care is an important and complex problem. Often, exact models of realistic size cannot be solved due to the curse of dimensionality and heuristics have to be used. In this paper we consider the appointment schedule of a physician's day. We assume patient types defined by different time preferences and service time lengths. Patient requests for the day are handled directly during a booking horizon. We present a mixed integer linear programming model to determine a set of appointments to offer a patient requesting an appointment. The objective is to schedule the requesting patient while also taking future demand into account. We want to maximize the overall utilization assuring a certain fairness level. We further perform a simulation in order to test the mixed integer linear program and to compare it to simpler online heuristics. We develop different scenarios and show that using the mixed integer linear program to schedule patients is beneficial.