Although the norm in many retail banks is to serve customers on a first-come, first-served basis, some customers try to cut the line, usually by providing an excuse for their urgency. In other queues, however, this behavior is considered unacceptable and is aggressively banned. In all of these...

We consider an <i>M</i>/<i>M</i>/1 queueing system with impatient consumers who observe the length of the queue before deciding whether to buy the product. The product may have high or low quality, and consumers are heterogeneously informed. The firm chooses a slow or (at a cost) a fast service rate. In...

This paper studies outsourcing decisions for a two-level service process in which the first level serves as a gatekeeper for a second level of experts. The objective of the system operator (the client) is to minimize the sum of staffing costs, customer waiting costs, and mistreatment costs due...

We consider the problem of simultaneously allocating servers and demands in a service system with independent multiple facilities. We assume a fixed number of facilities and total servers which must service a given Poisson arrival stream. We also assume that service times are identically...

In the design and operation of service systems, it is important to determine an appropriate level of server utilization (the proportion of time each server should be working). In a multi-server queue with unlimited waiting space, the appropriate server utilization typically increases as the...

In this paper a numerical method is presented to obtain the equilibrium results of the multiple finite source queueing model having a single server using a nonpreemptive fixed priority service discipline and where each class of customers has a different exponential interarrival density function...

An algorithm is developed to rapidly compute approximations for all the standard steady-state performance measures in the basic call-center queueing model M/GI/s/r+GI, which has a Poisson arrival process, independent and identically distributed (IID) service times with a general distribution, s...

We develop a model for the competitive interactions in service industries where firms cater to multiple customer classes or market segments with the help of shared service facilities or processes so as to exploit pooling benefits. Different customer classes typically have distinct sensitivities...

The transactional data of a queueing system are the recorded times of service commencement and service completion for each customer served. With increasing use of computers to aid or even perform service one often has machine readable transactional data, but virtually no information about the...

Motivated by semiconductor wafer fabrication, we consider a scheduling problem for a single-server multiclass queue. A single workstation fabricates semiconductor wafers according to a variety of different processes, where each process consists of multiple stages of service with a different...