Dynamic scheduling with cancellations: an application to chemotherapy appointment booking

Abstract

We study a dynamic scheduling problem that has the feature of due dates andtime windows. This problem arises in chemotherapy scheduling where patientsfrom different types have specific target dates along with time windows forappointment. We consider cancellation of appointments. The problem is modeledas a Markov Decision Process (MDP) and approximately solved using adirect-search based approximate dynamic programming (ADP) technique. Wecompare the performance of the ADP technique against the myopic policy underdiverse scenarios. Our computational results reveal that the ADP techniqueoutperforms the myopic policy on majority of problem sets we generated.