Question

Why are appointment systems used? What decisions are necessary to design an appointment system?

Describe some practical examples of the single-resource sequencing problem.

Answer 1

A system that is generally used by organizations operating in the health care sector to ease the daily activities within the organization is considered as Appointment system. One of the main objectives behind the usage of the appointment system is to monitor patients whose health status is not good. The appointment system also helps the administration department of a health care organization to follow up on the patients who have booked a slot in the organization.

There are two decisions that can be taken into consideration while designing an appointment system. The first one is whether to follow the sequencing rule while forming the system. This is the model that determines the order which is followed while calling patients and how each and every patient is assigned under different blocks according to their characteristics. For example, new patients have one separate block whereas old patients who revisit for check-up have another block. The second one is whether to follow the appointment rule while forming the appointment system. This rule focus on making the template of the Appointment system a basic one where the number of all the patients in each slot along with the length of intervals of the appointment is mentioned in each block.

Single resource or single machine sequencing problems can be observed in the chemical industry. In this type of industry, the main focus of the entire factory represents a process of integration that operates on one particular product at one time but in the sequence, there are different products. For example, a factory that manufactures paint focus on making different colors at the same time but the processor is the same. This is one of the practical examples of single-resource sequencing.