The Contextual Appointment Scheduling Problem

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.