Staffing a service system with appointment-based customer arrivals
- Authors
- Chung, Kwanghun; Min, Daiki
- Issue Date
- Oct-2014
- Publisher
- PALGRAVE MACMILLAN LTD
- Keywords
- service system; staffing requirements; appointment-based customer arrival; heuristic algorithm
- Citation
- JOURNAL OF THE OPERATIONAL RESEARCH SOCIETY, v.65, no.10, pp.1533 - 1543
- Journal Title
- JOURNAL OF THE OPERATIONAL RESEARCH SOCIETY
- Volume
- 65
- Number
- 10
- Start Page
- 1533
- End Page
- 1543
- URI
- https://scholarworks.bwise.kr/hongik/handle/2020.sw.hongik/16577
- DOI
- 10.1057/jors.2013.110
- ISSN
- 0160-5682
- 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.
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Collections - College of Business Administration > Business Administration Major > 1. Journal Articles
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