Number of services Sample Clauses

Number of services. The environmental factor ‘number of services’ self-evidently concerns the number of different services patients queue for at the clinic. In this respect, we can distinguish single-stage systems and multi-stage systems. A single-stage system is a system in which patients queue for a single service. In a multi-stage system there are multiple stages of care and the patient successively queues for different services such as pre-examination, the actual consultation, post- examination, etc (Cayirli & Veral, 2003). Despite the fact that such a setting is often the case in reality, most studies on outpatient scheduling consider single-stage systems. Xxxxxxx & Xxxxx (2003) refer to Rising, Xxxxx, & Xxxxxx (1973), Cox, Xxxxxxxx, & Xxxx (1985) and Xxxxxxx, Xxxxxxxx, Jun, & Xxxxx (2001) for papers on multi-stage systems. More recent papers that deal with multi-stage systems are Xxxxxx & Xxxxxxx (2015), Xxx (2015) and Xxxxxx, Jula, XxXxxxxxxx, & Xxxx (2015). Xxxxxx and Mandjes (2015) model the service system as a two- node tandem network, where the individual nodes correspond to two service stages that can deal with any service-time distribution which in addition may vary across patients. Xxxxxx et al. (2015) and Xxx (2015) consider multi-stage facilities that serve patients with non-identical, stochastic service times at each stage and that in addition follow heterogeneous service sequences (i.e. the specific order in which the stages are visited may vary from patient type to patient type).