Abstract:
Revenue management theory has been widely used in some service industries, such as airline industry, hotel industry and rail transport industry. Summarizing and analyzing the feasibility of revenue management, a basic inventory control model of outpatient appointment is presented. In the model, the appointment patients are divided as two classes: appointment for specialist doctors and appointment for general doctors. Taking cancellations and no-shows into account, a single-level price model of inventory control is built to handle the overbooking problem. Finally, the proposed control approach is proven in illustrative examples to perform more efficiently considering the maximum of the revenue.