Evaluation of Appointment Policy and Scheduling Rule for a Dental Clinic Based on Computer Simulation

시뮬레이션을 이용한 치과의원의 예약정책과 스케줄링 규칙 평가

In today's competitive dental markets, it is of paramount importance to improve service quality and at the same time to use scarce resource efficiently. In this study, we present appointment policies and scheduling rules for private dental clinics to reduce the waiting time of patients and to increase the revenue by utilizing resource more effectively. This study validates the proposed appointment policies and scheduling rules based on simulation models. We show that the bottleneck-based appointment policy is the most effective among appointment policies, followed by the multiple-block appointment one. The shortest processing time among scheduling rules contributes most to the performance of the appointment system.