Staffing a service system with appointment-based customer arrivals
- 주제(키워드) service system , staffing requirements , appointment-based customer arrival , heuristic algorithm
- 발행기관 PALGRAVE MACMILLAN LTD
- 발행년도 2014
- 총서유형 Journal
- URI http://www.dcollection.net/handler/ewha/000000108808
- 본문언어 영어
- Published As http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/jors.2013.110
초록/요약
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.
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