Admission control in a two-class loss system with periodically varying parameters and abandonments

Gabriel Zayas-Cabán () and Mark E. Lewis ()
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Gabriel Zayas-Cabán: University of Wisconsin
Mark E. Lewis: Cornell University

Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications, 2020, vol. 94, issue 1, No 8, 175-210

Abstract: Abstract Motivated by service systems, such as telephone call centers and emergency departments, we consider admission control for a two-class multi-server loss system with periodically varying parameters and customers who may abandon from service. Assuming mild conditions for the parameters, a dynamic programming formulation is developed. We show that under the infinite horizon discounted problem, there exists an optimal threshold policy and provide conditions for a customer class to be preferred for each fixed time, extending stationary results to the non-stationary setting. We approximate the non-stationary problem by discretizing the time horizon into equally spaced intervals and examine how policies for this approximation change as a function of time and parameters numerically. We compare the performance of these approximations with several admission policies used in practice in a discrete-event simulation study. We show that simpler admission policies that ignore non-stationarity or abandonments lead to significant losses in rewards.

Keywords: Dynamic programming/optimal control; Applications; Queues; Balking and reneging; Non-stationary; Optimization; 60K25; 90B22; 90C40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11134-019-09620-3

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