Vol.:(0123456789) Flexible Services and Manufacturing Journal https://doi.org/10.1007/s10696-019-09354-7 1 3 Scheduling outpatient day service operations for rheumatology diseases Rosita Guido 1  · Giuseppe Ielpa 2  · Domenico Conforti 1 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019 Abstract Appointment scheduling systems represent a method to manage patient waiting lists efectively. This work advances an innovative quantitative approach for the outpa- tient appointment scheduling problems, based on an optimization model, to manage outpatient Day Service operations. It focuses on outpatient appointment scheduling. We start from earlier works in the literature to design models with the objective to maximize the number of patients’ appointments, to reduce patient’s waiting time, and to increase patient’s satisfaction. The proposed combinatorial problem is solved by Answer Set Programming, which is a declarative logic formalism, widely used in Artifcial Intelligence and recognized as a powerful tool for Knowledge Repre- sentation and Reasoning, to show the advantages of declarative programming for modelling and fast prototyping problem requirements. We apply the model to solve real-life scenarios of the Rheumatology domain. We compare the results on the real instance already solved in our earlier work and extend the computational experi- ments on some new generated and realistic instances. Since the computational times increase with the size of instances, we develop a three-phase solution approach based on patient’s priority. The heuristic approach is hierarchical and enables to solve more instances than the one-run approach within the computational time limit. Keywords Patient appointment scheduling · Clinical pathways · Patient-centred policies · Ambulatory care · Day service · Answer set programming · Artifcial intelligence * Rosita Guido rosita.guido@unical.it Giuseppe Ielpa giuseppe.ielpa@unical.it Domenico Conforti domenico.conforti@unical.it 1 Department of Mechanical, Energy and Management Engineering, University of Calabria, Via Pietro Bucci, 87036 Rende, CS, Italy 2 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Calabria, Via Pietro Bucci, Rende, CS, Italy