Wait-Time Predictors for Customer Service Systems with Time-Varying Demand and Capacity.

Ibrahim, Rouba; Whitt, Ward

We develop new, improved real-time delay predictors for many-server service systems with a time-varying arrival rate, a time-varying number of servers, and customer abandonment. We develop four new predictors, two of which exploit an established deterministic fluid approximation for a many-server queueing model with those features. These delay predictors can be used to make delay announcements. We use computer simulation to show that the proposed predictors outperform previous predictors.

UNITED States; CUSTOMER services; COMPUTER simulation; TIME-varying systems; QUEUING theory; CONSUMER behavior

Operations Research, 2011, Vol 59, Issue 5, p1106

1526-5463

Academic Journal

10.1287/opre.1110.0974