We model a call center as a preemptive-resume priority queue with time-varying arrival rates and two priority classes of customers. The low priority customers have a dynamic priority where they become high priority if their waitingtime exceeds a given service-level time. The performance of the call center is measured by the mean number in system for the two customer classes. A fluid approximati...

A real-time stream is said to have (m, k)-firm deadlines if at least m out of any k consecutive customers from the stream must meet their respective deadlines. Such a stream is said to have encountered a dynamic failure if fewer than m out of any k consecutive customers meet their deadlines. Hamdaoui and Ramanathan recently proposed a scheduling policy called Distance Based Priority (DBP) in wh...

A well-known problem with priority policies is starvation of delaytolerant traffic. Additionally, insufficient control over delay differentiation (which is needed for modern network applications) has incited the development of sophisticated scheduling disciplines. The priority policy we present here has the benefit of being open to rigorous analysis. We study a discretetime queueing system with...

A call center with both contract and non-contract customers was giving priority to the contract customers only in off-peak hours, precisely when having priority was least important. In this paper we investigate whether this is rational behavior on the part of the call center and what the implications are for customers. In particular, we show that under contracts on the percentile of delay, whic...

We study a multi-class queueing network which consists of a finite capacity node (node 0) linked to M parallel finite capacity nodes (nodes 1 to M). M classes of customers are assumed. All customers first join node O. A class i customer after completion of its service at node °always joins the ith node. All service times and inter-arrival times are assumed to be exponentially distributed. The s...

This p p e r considers a nunpreemptive priority queue with two classes of customers. Customers in each priority class arrive to the system according to a Markovian arrival process (MAP). Since the MAP is weakly dense in the class of stationary point processes, it is a fairly general arrival process. The service times of custcomers in ea,ch priority class are independent and identically distribu...

We study the strategic purchasing of priorities in a time-dependent accumulating priority M/G/1 queue. We formulate a non-cooperative game in which customers purchase priority coefficients with the goal of reducing (possibly heterogeneous) waiting costs in exchange. The priority of each customer in the queue is a linear function of the individual waiting time, with the purchased coefficient bei...

We give a closed-form expression for the long-run average cost and the bias vector in a twoclass exponential preemptive resume priority queue with holding and switching costs. The bias vector is the sum of a quadratic function of the number of customers in each priority class and an exponential function of the number of customers in the high priority class. We use this result to perform a singl...

In this paper, we analyse two important and relatively complex performance measures, tail probability and switching frequency, for two class queueing system with two different (relative and earliest due date based) dynamic priority schemes across classes. A simulator is build to perform such analysis and various observations are made. Based on computational evidence, it is conjectured that two ...

How should a capacity-constrained firm design an incentive-compatible price-scheduling mechanism to maximize revenues from a heterogeneous pool of time-sensitive customers with private information on their willingness to pay, time-sensitivity and processing requirement? We consider this question in the context of a queueing system that serves two customer types. We provide the following insight...