Service Systems with Finite and Heterogeneous Customer Arrivals

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Wang, Rowan; Jouini, Oualid; Benjaafar, Saif
• 署名单位: Singapore Management University; Universite Paris Saclay; University of Minnesota System; University of Minnesota Twin Cities; Singapore University of Technology & Design
• 刊物名称: M&SOM-MANUFACTURING & SERVICE OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1523-4614
• DOI: 10.1287/msom.2014.0481
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 365-380
• 关键词: queueing systems; finite arrivals; heterogeneous interarrival and service times; transient analysis; fluid approximation

摘要

We consider service systems with a finite number of customer arrivals, where customer interarrival times and service times are both stochastic and heterogeneous. Applications of such systems are numerous and include systems where arrivals are driven by events or service completions in serial processes as well as systems where servers are subject to learning or fatigue. Using an embedded Markov chain approach, we characterize the waiting time distribution for each customer, from which we obtain various performance measures of interest, including the expected waiting time of a specific customer, the expected waiting time of an arbitrary customer, and the expected completion time of all customers. We carry out extensive numerical experiments to examine the effect of heterogeneity in interarrival and service times. In particular, we examine cases where interarrival and service times increase with each subsequent arrival or service completion, decrease, increase and then decrease, or decrease and then increase. We derive several managerial insights and discuss implications for settings where such features can be induced. We validate the numerical results using a fluid approximation that yields closed-form expressions.