Staffing a service system with appointment-based customer arrivals

Kwanghun Chung and Daiki Min
Additional contact information
Kwanghun Chung: Hongik University, Seoul, South Korea
Daiki Min: Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea

Journal of the Operational Research Society, 2014, vol. 65, issue 10, 1533-1543

Abstract: 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.

Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jors/journal/v65/n10/pdf/jors2013110a.pdf Link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
http://www.palgrave-journals.com/jors/journal/v65/n10/full/jors2013110a.html Link to full text HTML (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:jorsoc:v:65:y:2014:i:10:p:1533-1543

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... search/journal/41274

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the Operational Research Society is currently edited by Tom Archibald and Jonathan Crook

More articles in Journal of the Operational Research Society from Palgrave Macmillan, The OR Society
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().