An appointment policy is established for a specific outpatient system, with the goal of reducing a combination of patients' expected waiting times and doctor's expected overtime. Service times are stochastic, and patients are assumed to be punctual if they show for their appointments. Substantial reductions in waiting times can be obtained over traditional scheduling practices, and the procedure is easily implemented by a naive scheduler once the optimal policy is established.
We carry out a detailed bifurcation analysis for a common class of electrostatically driven nanowires in a multiphysics model. A finding is that the nanoscale system can exhibit distinct chaotic states: chaos with symmetry breaking and extensive chaos possessing the full symmetry of the system. Potential applications such as nanoscale random number generator and controlling extensive chaos to achieve desirable performance are articulated.
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