An appointment scheduling problem is studied with the consideration of customer impatience.On the assumption that both the time of leaving queue and the time of service are exponentially distributed,in order to minimi...An appointment scheduling problem is studied with the consideration of customer impatience.On the assumption that both the time of leaving queue and the time of service are exponentially distributed,in order to minimize the joint cost,the optimal appointment schedule of the fixed number of customers is studied.The joint cost function is composed of customers expected delay time and service availability time.The expected delay time of each customer in the queue is recursively computed in terms of customer interarrival time.Furthermore,the effect of impatience on the optimal schedule as well as the total operating cost is studied.The results show that as the impatience rate increases,the optimal interarrival time becomes shorter and the interarrival time of the last few customers gradually approaches that of the customers in the middle.In addition,impatient behaviors can increase the joint cost.展开更多
基金The National Natural Science Foundation of China(No.71671036)the Scientific Innovation Research of Graduate Students in Jiangsu Province(No.KYLX_0211)
文摘An appointment scheduling problem is studied with the consideration of customer impatience.On the assumption that both the time of leaving queue and the time of service are exponentially distributed,in order to minimize the joint cost,the optimal appointment schedule of the fixed number of customers is studied.The joint cost function is composed of customers expected delay time and service availability time.The expected delay time of each customer in the queue is recursively computed in terms of customer interarrival time.Furthermore,the effect of impatience on the optimal schedule as well as the total operating cost is studied.The results show that as the impatience rate increases,the optimal interarrival time becomes shorter and the interarrival time of the last few customers gradually approaches that of the customers in the middle.In addition,impatient behaviors can increase the joint cost.