Server Staffing to Meet Time-Varying Demand

Otis B. Jennings, Avishai Mandelbaum, William A. Massey and Ward Whitt
Additional contact information
Otis B. Jennings: School of Industrial and System Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332
Avishai Mandelbaum: Industrial and Management Engineering, The Technion, Haifa 32000, Israel
William A. Massey: Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, Room 2C-120, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974-0636
Ward Whitt: AT&T Laboratories, Room 2C-178, Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974-0636

Management Science, 1996, vol. 42, issue 10, 1383-1394

Abstract: We consider a multiserver service system with general nonstationary arrival and service-time processes in which s(t), the number of servers as a function of time, needs to be selected to meet projected loads. We try to choose s(t) so that the probability of a delay (before beginning service) hits or falls just below a target probability at all times. We develop an approximate procedure based on a time-dependent normal distribution, where the mean and variance are determined by infinite-server approximations. We demonstrate that this approximation is effective by making comparisons with the exact numerical solution of the Markovian M t /M/s t model.

Keywords: operator staffing; queues; nonstationary queues; queues with time-dependent arrival rates; multiserver queues; infinite-server queues; capacity planning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
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