Common wisdom suggests that, everything else being equal, seeing patients sooner rather than later is preferable. In particular, health outcomes improve with reduced delay and so does patient satisfaction. Meanwhile, if the delay in access to care is reduced, rescheduling becomes easier and thus...

We study large-scale service systems with multiple customer classes and many statistically identical servers. The following question is addressed: How many servers are required (staffing) and how does one match them with customers (control) in order to minimize cost or maximize profit, subject...

We use sample path arguments to derive convexity properties of an M/M/S queue withimpatient customers that balk and renege. First, assuming that the balking probability andreneging rate are increasing and concave in the total number of customers in the system(head-count), we prove that the...

Although pooling queues offers in principle many operational benefits, these may not always be achieved in practice. One reason, observed in the empirical study by Song et al. (2015), relates to customer ownership. In this paper, we formalize these empirical observations by developing a...