Service differentiation is an emerging method to improve profit and to better serve high-priority customers. Such an approach has recently been introduced by one of Europe's leading rail cargo companies. Under this approach, customers can choose between classic and premium service. Premium...

Results from classic queueing theory are shown to be useful for capacity planning of largescale multi-server systems. In the field of mainframe systems on-line monitoring and dynamic workload management care for the fulfilment of short-term performance goals with respect to service class...

One prevalent assumption in queueing theory is that the number of servers in a queueing model is deterministic. However, randomness in the number of available servers often arises in practice, e.g., in virtual call centers where agents are allowed to set their own schedules. In this paper, we...

We analytically study optimal capacity and flexible technology selection in parallel queuing systems. We consider N stochastic arrival streams that may wait in N queues before being processed by one of many resources (technologies) that differ in their flexibility. A resource's ability to...

Thanks to the abundant user-generated content on the review websites, customers can easily make a casual inference on the service speed through observing and learning from others' service experiences. We study a service system where customers make their join-or-balk decisions based on a sample...