Queues with slow servers and impatient customers

Nir Perel*, Uri Yechiali

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

82 Scopus citations

Abstract

We study M / M / c queues (c = 1, 1 < c < ∞ and c = ∞) in a 2-phase (fast and slow) Markovian random environment, with impatient customers. The system resides in the fast phase (phase 1) an exponentially distributed random time with parameter η and the arrival and service rates are λ and μ, respectively. The corresponding parameters for the slow phase (phase 0) are γ, λ0, and μ0 (≤ μ). When in the slow phase, customers become impatient. That is, each customer, upon arrival, activates an individual timer, exponentially distributed with parameter ξ. If the system does not change its environment from 0 to 1 before the customer's timer expires, the customer abandons the queue never to return. We concentrate on deriving analytic solutions to the queue-length distributions. We derive, for each case of c, the corresponding probability generating function, and calculate the mean queue size. Several extreme cases are investigated and numerical results are presented.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)247-258
Number of pages12
JournalEuropean Journal of Operational Research
Volume201
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 16 Feb 2010

Keywords

  • Abandonment
  • Alternating queue
  • Impatient customers
  • M / M / 1
  • M / M / c
  • M / M / ∞
  • Slow server(s)

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