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arXiv · 2108.05531

The Contextual Appointment Scheduling Problem

Nima Salehi Sadghiani·Saeid Motiian
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Abstract

This study is concerned with the determination of optimal appointment times for a sequence of jobs with uncertain duration. We investigate the data-driven Appointment Scheduling Problem (ASP) when one has $n$ observations of $p$ features (covariates) related to the jobs as well as historical data. We formulate ASP as an Integrated Estimation and Optimization problem using a task-based loss function. We justify the use of contexts by showing that not including the them yields to inconsistent decisions, which translates to sub-optimal appointments. We validate our approach through two numerical experiments.

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Nima Salehi Sadghiani, Saeid Motiian. 2021-08-12. The Contextual Appointment Scheduling Problem. https://arxiv.org/abs/2108.05531

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