INTRODUCTION Patient appointment systems are of great importance for efficiently managing outpatient clinics as well as patient satisfaction as an indirect indicator for quality care rendered. PURPOSE To describe the hourly block and standard sequential scheduling appointment systems at two different hospitals, as well as to assess the patients' opinions regarding their waiting time in both s...

Owing to the growing market in transportation networks and the mostly truck’s arrival in peak hours, trucks have to wait for available docks in a crossdocking platform (called also a cross-dock); this leads to increased congestion at the gate. Every time point where trucks have to wait is a waste for cross-dock yield. The congestion causes in turn planning problems in two ways. First, trucker h...

Appointment scheduling is a problem faced daily by many individuals and organizations. Cooperating agent systems have been developed to partially automate this task. In order to extend the circle of participants as far as possible we advocate the use of natural language transmitted by email. We demonstrate COSMA, a fully implemented German language server for existing appointment scheduling age...

We give a short overview of a prototype version of a fully distributed calendar and appointment system implemented on a network of workstations. We describe the software architecture, the appointment scheduling strategies and heuristics, the distributed implementation language, and the graphical user interface. The motivations for the realization of the system within a distributed systems resea...