Praise for the Third Edition: "This is one of the best books available. Its excellent organizational structure allows quick reference to specific models and its clear presentation . . . solidifies the understanding of the concepts being presented."IIE Transactions on Operations EngineeringThoroughly revised and expanded to reflect the latest developments in the field, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition continues to present the basic statistical principles that are necessary to analyze the probabilistic nature of queues. Rather than presenting a narrow focus on the subject, this update illustrates the wide-reaching, fundamental concepts in queueing theory and its applications to diverse areas such as computer science, engineering, business, and operations research.This update takes a numerical approach to understanding and making probable estimations relating to queues, with a comprehensive outline of simple and more advanced queueing models. Newly featured topics of the Fourth Edition include:Retrial queuesApproximations for queueing networksNumerical inversion of transformsDetermining the appropriate number of servers to balance quality and cost of serviceEach chapter provides a self-contained presentation of key concepts and formulae, allowing readers to work with each section independently, while a summary table at the end of the book outlines the types of queues that have been discussed and their results. In addition, two new appendices have been added, discussing transforms and generating functions as well as the fundamentals of differential and difference equations. New examples are now included along with problems that incorporate QtsPlus software, which is freely available via the book's related Web site.With its accessible style and wealth of real-world examples, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition is an ideal book for courses on queueing theory at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. It is also a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners who analyze congestion in the fields of telecommunications, transportation, aviation, and management science.

Fundamentals of Queueing Theory

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.

/pdf/appointment-scheduling-in-health-care-challenges-and-4zf8zvyszw.pdf

Appointment scheduling in health care: Challenges and opportunities

http://web.nchu.edu.tw/pweb/users/arborfish/lesson/8682.pdf

A survey of variants and extensions of the resource-constrained project scheduling problem

http://akturk.bilkent.edu.tr/ie573/aytug.pdf

Executing production schedules in the face of uncertainties: a review and some future directions

http://www.om-db.wi.tum.de/psplib/files/KH-18-2-05.pdf

Experimental investigation of heuristics for resource-constrained project scheduling: An update

The problem of patient no-shows (patients who do not arrive for scheduled appointments) is significant in many health care settings, where no-show rates can vary widely. No-shows reduce provider productivity and clinic efficiency, increase health care costs, and limit the ability of a clinic to serve its client population by reducing its effective capacity. In this article, we examine the problem of no-shows and propose appointment overbooking as one means of reducing the negative impact of no-shows. We find that patient access and provider productivity are significantly improved with overbooking, but that overbooking causes increases in both patient wait times and provider overtime. We develop a new clinic utility function to capture the trade-offs between these benefits and costs, and we show that the relative values that a clinic assigns to serving additional patients, minimizing patient waiting times, and minimizing clinic overtime will determine whether overbooking is warranted. From the results of a series of simulation experiments, we determine that overbooking provides greater utility when clinics serve larger numbers of patients, no-show rates are higher, and service variability is lower. Even with highly variable service times, many clinics will achieve positive net results with overbooking. Our analysis provides valuable guidance to clinic administrators about the use of appointment overbooking to improve patient access, provider productivity, and overall clinic performance.

Clinic Overbooking to Improve Patient Access and Increase Provider Productivity

The problem of no-shows (patients who do not arrive for scheduled appointments) is particularly significant for health care clinics, with reported no-show rates varying widely from 3% to 80%. No-shows reduce revenues and provider productivity, increase costs, and limit patient access by reducing effective clinic capacity. In this article, we construct a flexible appointment scheduling model to mitigate the detrimental effects of patient no-shows, and develop a fast and effective solution procedure that constructs near-optimal overbooked appointment schedules that balance the benefits of serving additional patients with the potential costs of patient waiting and clinic overtime. Computational results demonstrate the efficacy of our model and solution procedure, and connect our work to prior research in health care appointment scheduling.

Appointment Overbooking in Health Care Clinics to Improve Patient Service and Clinic Performance

https://leeds-faculty.colorado.edu/lawrencs/Research/PubPapers/RCPS%20Multi%20Tardy%20Costs.pdf

Resource-constrained multi-project scheduling with tardy costs: Comparing myopic, bottleneck, and resource pricing heuristics

Heuristic, optimal, static, and dynamic schedules when processing times are uncertain

We examine the phenomenon of shifting production bottlenecks from an analytic perspective. We quantify the propensity of a work center to be a bottleneck, defined as maximal queue length, using a simple Jackson production network model. Comparison of the analytic model against an empirical simulation-based model shows that the two are in good agreement. A scalar measure of bottleneck shiftiness is proposed and used to investigate several policies for mitigating shiftiness. Simulation experiments show that several commonly observed managerial policies for coping with shifting bottlenecks actually increase shiftiness, but that shiftiness declines when the capacity of nonbottleneck resources is increased.

Stephen R. Lawrence

Papers

Clinic Overbooking to Improve Patient Access and Increase Provider Productivity

Appointment Overbooking in Health Care Clinics to Improve Patient Service and Clinic Performance

Resource-constrained multi-project scheduling with tardy costs: Comparing myopic, bottleneck, and resource pricing heuristics

Heuristic, optimal, static, and dynamic schedules when processing times are uncertain

Shifting production bottlenecks: causes, cures, and conundrums