Dietz Dennis C
CenturyLink, Inc., Boulder, CO 80301, USA.
ScientificWorldJournal. 2014 Jan 30;2014:949726. doi: 10.1155/2014/949726. eCollection 2014.
A cogent method is presented for computing the expected cost of an appointment schedule where customers are statistically identical, the service time distribution has known mean and variance, and customer no-shows occur with time-dependent probability. The approach is computationally efficient and can be easily implemented to evaluate candidate schedules within a schedule optimization algorithm.