Preference based load balancing as an outpatient appointment scheduling aid

Load balancing is a performance improvement aid in various applications of distributed systems. In this paper we propose a preference based load balancing strategy as a scheduling aid in an outpatient clinic of an online medical consultation system. The performance objectives are to maximizing throughout and minimizing waiting time. Patients will provide a standard set of preferences prior to scheduling an appointment. The preferences are rated on to a scale and each service request will have a respective preference score. The available doctors will also be classified into classes based on their clinical expertise and the nature of the past diagnosis and the types of patients consulted. The preference scores will then be mapped on to each class and the appointment will be scheduled. The proposed scheme was modeled as a queuing system in Matlab. Matlab SimEvents library modules were used for constructing the model. Performance was analysed based on the average waiting time and utilization. The results revealed that the preference based load balancing scheme markedly reduce the waiting time and significantly improve the utilization under different load conditions.