Appointment scheduling systems are used by primary and specialty care clinics to manage access to service providers, as well as by hospitals to schedule elective surgeries. Many factors affect the performance of appointment systems including arrival and service time variability, patient and provider preferences, available information technology and the experience level of the scheduling staff. In addition, a critical bottleneck lies in the application of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IE/OR) techniques. The most common types of health care delivery systems are described in this article with particular attention on the factors that make appointment scheduling challenging. For each environment relevant decisions ranging from a set of rules that guide schedulers to real-time responses to deviations from plans are described. A road map of the state of the art in the design of appointment management systems is provided and future opportunities for novel applications of IE/OR models are identified.

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Appointment scheduling in health care: Challenges and opportunities

In this 25th year anniversary paper for the IEEE Real Time Systems Symposium, we review the key results in real-time scheduling theory and the historical events that led to the establishment of the current real-time computing infrastructure. We conclude this paper by looking at the challenges ahead of us.

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Real Time Scheduling Theory: A Historical Perspective

The constantly increasing demand for more computing power can seem impossible to keep up with. However, multicore processors capable of performing computations in parallel allow computers to tackle ever larger problems in a wide variety of applications. This book provides a comprehensive introduction to parallel computing, discussing theoretical issues such as the fundamentals of concurrent processes, models of parallel and distributed computing, and metrics for evaluating and comparing parallel algorithms, as well as practical issues, including methods of designing and implementing shared- and distributed-memory programs, and standards for parallel program implementation, in particular MPI and OpenMP interfaces. Each chapter presents the basics in one place followed by advanced topics, allowing novices and experienced practitioners to quickly find what they need. A glossary and more than 80 exercises with selected solutions aid comprehension. The book is recommended as a text for advanced undergraduate or graduate students and as a reference for practitioners.

Introduction to Parallel Computing

http://www.cs.qub.ac.uk/~B.McCollum/publications/EJOR_07.pdf

A Graph-Based Hyper-Heuristic for Educational Timetabling Problems

We encounter optimization problems in our daily lives and in various research domains. Some of them are so hard that we can, at best, approximate the best solutions with (meta-) heuristic methods. However, the huge number of optimization problems and the small number of generally acknowledged methods mean that more metaheuristics are needed to fill the gap. We propose a new metaheuristic, called chemical reaction optimization (CRO), to solve optimization problems. It mimics the interactions of molecules in a chemical reaction to reach a low energy stable state. We tested the performance of CRO with three nondeterministic polynomial-time hard combinatorial optimization problems. Two of them were traditional benchmark problems and the other was a real-world problem. Simulation results showed that CRO is very competitive with the few existing successful metaheuristics, having outperformed them in some cases, and CRO achieved the best performance in the real-world problem. Moreover, with the No-Free-Lunch theorem, CRO must have equal performance as the others on average, but it can outperform all other metaheuristics when matched to the right problem type. Therefore, it provides a new approach for solving optimization problems. CRO may potentially solve those problems which may not be solvable with the few generally acknowledged approaches.

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Chemical-Reaction-Inspired Metaheuristic for Optimization

Introduction Introduction and Notation, Joseph Y-T. Leung A Tutorial on Complexity, Joseph Y-T. Leung Some Basic Scheduling Algorithms, Joseph Y-T. Leung Classical Scheduling Problems Elimination Rules for Job-shop Scheduling Problem: Overview and Extensions, Jacques Carlier, Laurent Peridy, Eric Pinson, and David Rivreau Flexible Hybrid Flowshops, George Vairaktarakis Open Shop Scheduling, Teofilo F. Gonzalez Cycle Shop Scheduling, Vadim G. Timkovsky Reducibility among Scheduling Classes, Vadim G. Timkovsky Parallel Scheduling for Early Completion, Bo Chen Minimizing the Maximum Lateness, Hans Kellerer Approximation Algorithms for Minimizing Average Weighted Completion Time, Chandra Chekuri and Sanjeev Khanna Minimizing the Number of Tardy Jobs, Marjan van den Akker and Han Hoogeveen Branch-and-Bound Algorithms for Total Weighted Tardiness, Antoino Jouglet, Philippe Baptiste, and Jacques Carlier Scheduling Equal Processing Time Jobs, Philippe Baptiste and Peter Brucker Online Scheduling, Kirk Pruhs, Jiri Sgall, and Eric Torng Convex Quadratic Relaxations in Scheduling, Jay Sethuraman Other Scheduling Models The Master/Slave Scheduling Model, Sartaj Sahni and George Vairaktarakis Scheduling in Bluetooth Networks, Yong Man Kim and Ten H. Lai Fair Sequences, Wieslaw Kubiak Due-Date Quotation Models and Algorithms, Philip Kaminsky and Dorit Hochbaum Scheduling with Due-Date Assignment, Valery S. Gordon, Jean-Marie Proth, and Vitaly A. Strusevich Machine Scheduling with Availability Constraints, Chung-Yee Lee Scheduling with Discrete Resource Constraints, J. B_lazewicz, N. Brauner, and G. Finke Scheduling with Resource Constraints-Continuous Resources, Joanna J'ozefowska and Jan Weglarz Scheduling Parallel Tasks-Algorithms and Complexity, M. Drozdowski Scheduling Parallel Tasks Approximation Algorithms, Pierre-Franc' ois Dutot, Gr'egory Mouni'e, and Denis Trystram Real-Time Scheduling The Pinwheel: A Real-Time Scheduling Problem, Deji Chen and Aloysivs Mok Scheduling Real-Time Tasks: Algorithms and Complexity, Sanjay Baruah and Joael Goossens Real Time Synchronization Protocols, Lui Sha and Marco Caccamo Fair Scheduling of Real-Time Tasks on Multiprocessors, James Anderson, Philip Holman, and Anand Srinivasan A Categorization of Real-Time Multiprocessor Scheduling Problems and Algorithms, John Carpenter, Shelby Funk, Philip Holman, Anand Srinivasan, James Anderson, and Sanjoy Baruah Approximation Algorithms for Scheduling Time-Critical Jobs on Multiprocessor System, Sudarshan K. Dhall Scheduling Overloaded Real-Time Systems with Competitive/Worst Case Guarantees, Gilad Koren and Dennis Shasha Minimizing TotalWeighted Error for Imprecise Computation Tasks and Related Problems, Joseph Y-T. Leung Dual Criteria Optimization Problems for Imprecise Computation Tasks, Kevin I-J Ho Periodic Reward-Based Scheduling and Its Application to Power-Aware Real-Time Systems, Hakan Aydin, Rami Melhem, and Daniel Mosse Routing Real-Time Messages on Networks, G. Young Stochastic Scheduling and Queueing Networks Offline Deterministic Scheduling, Stochastic Scheduling, and Online Deterministic Scheduling: A Comparative Overview, Michael Pinedo Stochastic Scheduling with Earliness and Tardiness Penalties, Xiaoqiang Cai and Xian Zhou Developments in Queueing Networks with Tractable Solutions, Xiuli Chao Scheduling in Secondary Storage Systems, Alexander Thomasian Selfish Routing on the Internet, Artur Czumaj Applications Scheduling of Flexible Resources in Professional Service Firms, Yalcin Akcay, Anantaram Balakrishnan, and Susan H. Xu Novel Metaheuristic Approaches to Nurse Rostering Problems in Belgian Hospitals, Edmund Kieran Burke, Patrick De Causmaecker and Greet Vanden Berghe University Timetabling, Sanja Petrovic and Edmund Burke Adapting the GATES Architecture to Scheduling Faculty, R. P. Brazile and K. M. Swigger Constraint Programming for Scheduling, John J. Kanet, Sanjay L. Ahire, and Michael F. Gorman Batch Production Scheduling in the Process Industries, Karsten Gentner, Klaus Neumann, Christoph Schwindt, and Norbert Trautmann A Composite Very-Large-Scale Neighborhood Search Algorithm for the Vehicle Routing Problem, Richa Agarwal, Ravinder K. Ahuja, Gilbert Laporte, and Zuo-Jun "Max" Shen Scheduling Problems in the Airline Industry, Xiangtong Qi, Jian Yang and Gang Yu Bus and Train Driver Scheduling, Raymond S. K. Kwan Sports Scheduling, Kelly Easton, George Nemhauser, and Michael Trick Index

Laurie Kelly

Papers

Handbook of Scheduling: Algorithms, Models, and Performance Analysis