• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.20 no.3
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• pp.29-39
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• 2011

The appointment system is widely used to facilitate customer access to service in many industries including healthcare and others. Because of its importance, much research has investigated how to build an effective appointment policy under various environments. However, most research has considered a single-server service system. The objective of this work is to evaluate several appointment policies in a two-stage service system in which multiple servers are available and build separate appointments at the second-stage. In such a system, we propose and evaluate the staggering appointment policy. Simulation experiments indicate that the proposed staggering appointment policy outperforms other traditional appointment policies in terms of customer waiting time, server idle time, and the number of customers who are later to scheduled appointments.