This paper investigates optimal pricing policies for a service facility modeled as a queueing system. Arriving customers are accepted if they are willing to pay the price charged by the service provider and if there is room in the waiting area. Capacity of the waiting area can be either finite or infinite. We determine expressions for the optimal prices that maximize the service provider’s long...

The vehicle routing problem with time windows (VRPTW) is an extension of the vehicle routing problem (VRP) with earliest, latest, and service times for customers. The VRPTW routes a set of vehicles to service customers having earliest, latest service times. The objective of the problem is to minimize the number of vehicles and the distance travelled to service the customers. The constraints of ...

A many-server queueing system is considered in which customers arrive according to a renewal process, and have service and patience times that are drawn from two independent sequences of independent, identically distributed random variables. Customers enter service in the order of arrival and are assumed to abandon the queue if the waiting time in queue exceeds the patience time. The state Y (N...

We consider an M/G/1 queue with the special feature of additional negative customers, who arrive according to a Poisson process. Negative customers require no service, but at their arrival a stochastic amount of work is instantaneously removed from the system. We show that the workload distribution in this M/G/1 queue with negative customers equals the waiting time distribution in a GI/G/1 queu...

Example 1 Consider a queue where customers arrive one by one. There is a single server that serves each customer on a first-come-first-served basis. Define the sojourn time experienced by a customer as the time he/she spends in the system: waiting (if any) for service plus the duration of the service at the server. The server toggles between being idle for some time when there are no customers ...

This paper deals with finite capacity single server queuing system with vacations. Vacation starts at rate nu if the system is empty. Also the server takes another vacation if upon his arrival to the system, finds the system empty. Customers arrive in the system in Poisson fashion at rate lamda0 during vacation, faster rate lamdaf during active service and slower rate lamdas during the breakdow...

In a call center, agents may handle calls at different speeds, and also may be more or less successful at resolving customers’ inquiries, even when only considering customers calling with similar requests. One common measure of successful call resolution is whether or not the call results in the customer calling back. This presents a natural trade-off between speed and quality, where speed is d...

We focus on tandem queues with subexponential service time distributions. We assume that number of customers in front of the first station is infinite and there is infinite room for finished customers after the last station but the size of the buffer between two consecutive stations is finite. Using (max,+) linear recursions, we investigate the tail asymptotics of transient response times and w...

We study the market partition between two distinct firms that deliver services to waiting time sensitive customers. In our model, the incoming customers select a firm on the basis of its posted price, the expected waiting time and its brand. More specifically, we quantify by a cost any departure from the ideal brand expected by each incoming customer. Considering that the two underlying queuein...

background different strategies for addressing the challenge of prioritizing elective patients efficiently and fairly have been introduced in norway. in the time period studied, there were three possible outcomes for elective patients that had been through the process of priority setting: (i) high priority with assigned individual maximum waiting time; (ii) low priority without a maximum waiti...