Service systems are typically limited resource environments where scarce capacity is reserved for the most urgent customers. However, there has been a growing interest in the use of proactive service when a less urgent customer may become urgent while waiting. On one hand, providing service for customers when they are less urgent could mean that fewer resources are needed to fulfill their service requirement. On the other hand, using limited capacity for customers who may never need the service in the future takes the capacity away from other more urgent customers who need it now. To understand this tension, we propose a multiserver queueing model with two customer classes: moderate and urgent. We allow customers to transition classes while waiting. In this setting, we characterize how moderate and urgent customers should be prioritized for service when proactive service for moderate customers is an option. We identify an index, the modified [Formula: see text]-index, which plays an important role in determining the optimal scheduling policy. This index lends itself to an intuitive interpretation of how to balance holding costs, service times, abandonments, and transitions between customer classes. This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, stochastic models and simulation.
This content will become publicly available on July 6, 2023
Managing Queues with Different Resource Requirements
Queueing models that are used to capture various service settings typically assume that customers require a single unit of resource (server) to be processed. However, there are many service settings where such an assumption may fail to capture the heterogeneity in resource requirements of different customers. We propose a multiserver queueing model with multiple customer classes in which customers from different classes may require different amounts of resources to be served. We study the optimal scheduling policy for such systems. To balance holding costs, service rates, resource requirement, and priority-induced idleness, we develop an index-based policy that we refer to as the idle-avoid [Formula: see text] rule. For a two-class two-server model, where policy-induced idleness can have a big impact on system performance, we characterize cases where the idle-avoid [Formula: see text] rule is optimal. In other cases, we establish a uniform performance bound on the amount of suboptimality incurred by the idle-avoid [Formula: see text] rule. For general multiclass multiserver queues, we establish the asymptotic optimality of the idle-avoid [Formula: see text] rule in the many-server regime. For long-time horizons, we show that the idle-avoid [Formula: see text] is throughput optimal. Our theoretical results, along with numerical experiments, provide more »
- Award ID(s):
- 1762544
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10383874
- Journal Name:
- Operations Research
- ISSN:
- 0030-364X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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