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Appointment Sequencing: Why The Smallest-Variance-First Rule May Not Be Optimal, Qingxia Kong, Chung-Yee Lee, Chung-Piaw Teo, Zhichao Zheng

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We study the design of a healthcare appointment system with a single physician and a group of patients whose service durations are stochastic. The challenge is to find the optimal arrival sequence for a group of mixed patients such that the expected total cost of patient waiting time and physician overtime is minimized. While numerous simulation studies report that sequencing patients by increasing order of variance of service duration (Smallest-Variance-First or SVF rule) performs extremely well in many environments, analytical results on optimal sequencing are known only for two patients. In this paper, we shed light on why it is …