Predicting Queueing Delays

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

Management Science, 1999, vol. 45, issue 6, 870-888

Abstract: This paper investigates the possibility of predicting each customer's waiting time in queue before starting service in a multiserver service system with the first-come first-served service discipline, such as a telephone call center. A predicted waiting-time distribution or an appropriate summary statistic such as the mean or the 90th percentile may be communicated to the customer upon arrival and possibly thereafter in order to improve customer satisfaction. The predicted waiting-time distribution may also be used by the service provider to better manage the service system, e.g., to help decide when to add additional service agents. The possibility of making reliable predictions is enhanced by exploiting information about system state, including the number of customers in the system ahead of the current customer. Additional information beyond the number of customers in the system may be obtained by classifying customers and the service agents to which they are assigned. For nonexponential service times, the elapsed service times of customers in service can often be used to advantage to compute conditional-remaining-service-time distributions. Approximations are proposed to convert the distributions of remaining service times into the distribution of the desired customer waiting time. The analysis reveals the advantage from exploiting additional information.

Keywords: service systems; telephone call centers; predicting delays; communicating anticipated delays; predicting response times (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1999
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.45.6.870 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:45:y:1999:i:6:p:870-888

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().