Analysis and Comparison of Queues with Different Levels of Delay Information.
Date
2007
Author
Advisors
Zipkin, Paul H.
Kulkarni, Vidyadhar G.
Majumder, Pranab
Song, Jing-Sheng (Jeannette)
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Abstract
Information about delays can enhance service quality in many industries. Delay information
can take many forms, with different degrees of precision. Different levels of information
have different effects on customers and so on the overall system. The goal of this
research is to explore these effects. We first consider a queue with balking under
three levels of delay information: No information, partial information (the system
occupancy) and full information (the exact waiting time). We assume Poisson arrivals,
independent, exponential service times, and a single server. Customers decide whether
to stay or balk based on their expected waiting costs, conditional on the information
provided. By comparing the three systems, we identify some important cases where
more accurate delay information improves performance. In other cases, however, information
can actually hurt the provider or the customers. We then investigate the impacts on
the system of different cost functions and weight distributions. Specifically, we
compare systems where these parameters are related by various stochastic orders, under
different information scenarios. We also explore the relationship between customer
characteristics and the value of information. The results here are mostly negative.
We find that the value of information need not be greater for less patient or more
risk-averse customers. After that, we extend our analysis to systems with phase-type
service times. Our analytical and numerical results indicate that the previous conclusions
about systems with exponential service times still hold for phase-type service times.
We also show that service-time variability degrades the system’s performance. At last,
we consider two richer models of information: In the first model, an arriving customer
learns an interval in which the system occupancy falls. In the second model, each
customer’s service time is the sum of a geometric number of i.i.d. exponential phases,
and an arriving customer learns the total number of phases remaining in the system.
For each information model, we compare two systems, identical except that one has
more precise information. We study the effects of information on performance as seen
by the service provider and the customers.
Type
DissertationDepartment
Business AdministrationPermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/189Citation
Guo, Pengfei (2007). Analysis and Comparison of Queues with Different Levels of Delay Information. Dissertation, Duke University. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/189.Collections
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