Partitioning Customers into Service Groups

Ward Whitt
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Ward Whitt: Room A117, AT&T Labs, Shannon Laboratory, 180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, New Jersey 07932-0971

Management Science, 1999, vol. 45, issue 11, 1579-1592

Abstract: We explore the issues of when and how to partition arriving customers into service groups that will be served separately, in a first-come first-served manner, by multiserver service systems having a provision for waiting, and how to assign an appropriate number of servers to each group. We assume that customers can be classified upon arrival, so that different service groups can have different service-time distributions. We provide methodology for quantifying the tradeoff between economies of scale associated with larger systems and the benefit of having customers with shorter service times separated from other customers with longer service times, as is done in service systems with express lines. To properly quantify this tradeoff, it is important to characterize service-time distributions beyond their means. In particular, it is important to also determine the variance of the service-time distribution of each service group. Assuming Poisson arrival processes, we then can model the congestion experienced by each server group as an M/G/squeue with unlimited waiting room. We use previously developed approximations for M/G/sperformance measures to quickly evaluate alternative partitions.

Keywords: queues; multiserver queues; service systems; service-system design; resource sharing; service systems with express lines (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (20)

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