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Data availability enables clinics to use predictive analytics to improve appointment scheduling and overbooking decisions based on the predicted likelihood of patients missing their appointment (no-shows). Analyzing data using machine learning can uncover hidden patterns and provide valuable business insights to devise new business models to better meet consumers’ needs and seek a competitive advantage in healthcare. The innovative application of machine learning and analytics can significantly increase the operational efficiency of online scheduling. This study offers an intelligent, yet explainable, analytics framework in scheduling systems for primary-care clinics considering individual patients’ no-show rates that may vary for each appointment day and time while generating appointment and overbooking decisions. We use the predicted individual no-show rates in two ways: (1) a probability-based greedy approach to schedule patients in time slots with the lowest no-show likelihood, and (2) marginal analysis to identify the number of overbookings based on the no-show probabilities of the regularly-scheduled patients. We find that the summary measures of profit and cost are considerably improved with the proposed scheduling approach as well as an increase in the number of patients served due to a substantial decrease in the no-show rate. Sensitivity analysis confirms the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic scheduling framework even further.

With the growth of the cloud computing market, the number and scale of cloud data centers are expanding rapidly. While cloud data centers provide a large amount of computing power, generating tremendous energy consumption has become a fundamental issue in the financial and environmental fields. Improving quality of service and reducing energy costs are fundamental challenges for next-generation cloud data centers. Task scheduling in cloud data centers grows increasingly complex due to the heterogeneity of computing resources, intricate dependencies of jobs and rising expenses resulting from high energy consumption. Efficiently utilizing computing resources is crucial, so it is necessary to develop optimal strategies for job scheduling. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning-based task scheduler (E2DSched) for online scheduling of randomly arriving directed acyclic graph jobs in cloud data centers. E2DSched divides the scheduling process into three layers: task selection layer, server selection layer and frequency control layer. It achieves joint optimization of energy consumption and quality of service through three-layer cooperation. Finally, we compare E2DSched with various other algorithms, and the results show that E2DSched can provide excellent service with less energy consumption.

The performance of safety-critical systems implemented on multi-core platforms depends heavily on the scheduling mechanism used. This paper addresses the problem of multi-core scheduling of a real-time application modelled as a Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) with multiple service levels (where, a higher service level implies higher Quality-of-Service (QoS)), by proposing a novel two-phase offline–online scheduling mechanism called HYBRID-SCHED . The offline phase constructs a static schedule assuming worst-case execution behaviour, in order to ensure desired predictability with a minimum guaranteed QoS under all possible execution scenarios. Two alternative offline solution strategies have been designed. While the first strategy is a fast but reasonably good heuristic solution called Service-level Aware Scheduler (SAS) , the second is a branch-and-bound based optimal solution-space search technique. However, online execution based on strict adherence to the static schedule may result in poor resource utilization as actual execution time of tasks at run time may be significantly less than worst-case estimates. In order to improve the situation, an online scheduler called Actual Execution-time Aware Scheduler (AEAS) has been developed. The basic goal of AEAS is to strategically reclaim resources that were provided for tasks at design time but are in fact being used inactively at run time. By gradually raising the service levels of the remaining (yet-to-be-completed) jobs, AEAS can then use the recovered resources to improve system-level QoS. Using real-world benchmark applications, we assessed the performance of the suggested framework. Results obtained demonstrate the usefulness of our plan.

Due to different heterogeneous cloud resources and diverse and complex applications of the users, an optimal task scheduling, which can satisfy users and cloud service providers with energy-saving and cost-effective use of resources, is a major issue in cloud computing. On the one hand, network users are demanding the quality assurance of their requested services, minimizing their costs, and their own data security, and on the other hand, the service providers consider less power consumption, more efficient use of resources, and optimal utilization. In dependent tasks dealing with massive data, resource scheduling is considered as an important challenge. Due to the time limitation of online scheduling process of dependent tasks, many existing methods of the literature are not able to guarantee the best resource utilization. In this paper, a reinforcement learning approach is exploited in a multi-agent system for task scheduling and resource provisioning, in order to reduce the makespan, minimize the required power, optimize the cost of using the resources, and maximize the utilization of the resources (considering their expiration time), simultaneously. The proposed algorithm has two phases. In the first phase, the tasks are scheduled using reinforcement learning techniques, and in the second one, considering the information obtained from the scheduling phase, resources are allocated in a multi-agent environment. The results of experiments show that this method improves the efficiency of the use of resources and reduces their costs. Moreover, the expiration time of the tasks is observed and the total execution time and energy consumption will be significantly reduced.

The objective of this study was to identify patient preferences for outpatient diagnostic imaging services and analyze how patients make trade-offs between attributes of these services using a discrete choice experiment (DCE). We used a DCE with 14 choice questions asking which imaging locations patients would prefer. We used latent class analysis to analyze preference heterogeneity between different patient groups and to estimate the relative value they assign to different attributes of imaging services. Our analysis showed that the “Experienced Patients” subgroup generally value diagnostic imaging services in both acute and chronic situations and had a strong preference for hospital outpatient radiology departments (HORD) that would provide services at lower costs, where their images would be interpreted by a specialty radiologist, the clinic would be recommended by their PCP, online scheduling would be available, service rating were higher, and travel and wait times would be shorter. New Patients significantly valued the service rating of the (HORD and online scheduling. HORDs can be more competitive by providing services that live up to expectations better than available retail radiology clinics (RRCs). Most RRCs do not currently offer online scheduling so ease of use may also steer patients towards HORDs. HORDs have the advantage of being linked to the main medical center which has the reputation of having clinical expertise and more sophisticated technology. We conclude that there is room for medical centers to build HORDs that provide an appealing and competitive alternative to current RRC.

Cloud computing, with elasticity and pay-as-you-go pricing, is a suitable platform for executing workflow applications. Workflow as a Service (WaaS) systems provide scientists with an easy-to-use, and cost-effective platform to execute their workflow applications in the cloud at any time or location worldwide. Quality of Service (QoS) is recognized as a key requirement in WaaS. Monetary cost and time are two primary QoS from a clients’ perspective; whereas, energy consumption is considered a significant problem for cloud providers’ profitability and ability to provide low-cost services. Most workflow scheduling studies assume that workflow tasks have a deterministic Execution Time (ET), which is generally unrealistic in the real world. However, there are few approaches for scheduling in WaaS considering deadlines, and monetary costs with uncertain task ET. These studies typically assume that a cloud resource can execute all types of workflow applications without any need for additional software components. However, using containers is a suitable solution to provide an executable environment for the execution of any workflow type on cloud resources. To this end, we present two cost and energy-aware workflow scheduling that consider the uncertainty in tasks’ ETs. Both solutions are designed for WaaS, leveraging containers to enhance resource utilization rate and reduce energy consumption, resource monetary cost, and workflows deadline violations. Simulated experiments demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform two recent state-of-the-art scheduling algorithms in terms of success rate, monetary cost, energy consumption, and resource utilization rate.

The simultaneous integration of information from sensors with business data and how to acquire valuable information can be challenging. This paper proposes the simultaneous integration of information from sensors and business data. The proposal is supported by an industrial implementation, which integrates intelligent sensors and real-time decision-making, using a combination of PLC and PC Platforms in a three-level architecture: cloud-fog-edge. Automatic identification intelligent sensors are used to improve the decision-making of a dynamic scheduling tool. The proposed platform is applied to an industrial use-case in analytical Quality Control (QC) laboratories. The regulatory complexity, the personalized production, and traceability requirements make QC laboratories an interesting use case. We use intelligent sensors for automatic identification to improve the decision-making of a dynamic scheduling tool. Results show how the integration of intelligent sensors can improve the online scheduling of tasks. Estimations from system processing times decreased by over 30%. The proposed solution can be extended to other applications such as predictive maintenance, chemical industry, and other industries where scheduling and rescheduling are critical factors for the production.

This work considers a semi-online version of scheduling on m identical machines, where the objective is to minimize the makespan. In the variant studied here, jobs are presented sorted by non-increasing sizes, and a buffer of size k is available for storing at most k jobs. Every arriving job has to be either placed into the buffer until its assignment, or else it has to be assigned immediately to a machine. We prove a lower bound greater than 1 on the competitive ratio of the problem for any m and any buffer size. To complement this negative result, we design a simple algorithm for any m whose competitive ratio tends to 1 as the buffer size grows. Using those results, we show the best possible competitive ratio is 1 + Θ ( m k ) . We provide additional bounds for small values of m . In particular, we show that for m = 2 the case k = 1 is not different from the case without a buffer, while k = 2 admits an improved competitive ratio.

In this paper we study the online over-time scheduling on an unbounded parallel-batch machine to minimize the weighted makespan. First, we show that the general problem has a low bound 2 and then design a 4-competitive online algorithm. Furthermore, we consider a special case in which the jobs have agreeable processing times and weights. When all jobs have the same weights (the task is to minimize the makespan), an online algorithm with the best possible competitive ratio 5 + 1 2 ≈ 1.618 has been established in the literature. We show that, after a slightly modification, this known online algorithm also has the best possible competitive ratio 5 + 1 2 ≈ 1.618 for our problem. Finally, we introduce limited restarts into the above special case and present an online algorithm with a better competitive ratio 11 7 ≈ 1.571 .

An online scheduling problem on a bounded parallel-batch machine to minimize the maximum weighted flow-time is considered in this paper. Jobs arrive over time with the identical processing time. The maximum ratio between the weights of any two jobs is w. The parallel-batch machine can process at most b jobs simultaneously as a batch, and the jobs in a batch have the same starting time and the same completion time. For this problem, a deterministic online algorithm is presented. The algorithm is showed to be the best possible with a competitive ratio of 4w+1+12 when w∈[1,2], and to have a competitive ratio not greater than w when w∈(2,+∞).