Commissioned Paper: Telephone Call Centers: Tutorial, Review, and Research Prospects
Manufacturing & Service Operations Management
Dimensioning Large Call Centers
Operations Research
The Slow Server Problem for Uninformed Customers
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
Dynamic Routing in Large-Scale Service Systems with Heterogeneous Servers
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
Control of a Heterogeneous Two-Server Exponential Queueing System
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
Queue-and-Idleness-Ratio Controls in Many-Server Service Systems
Mathematics of Operations Research
Fair Dynamic Routing in Large-Scale Heterogeneous-Server Systems
Operations Research
A blind policy for equalizing cumulative idleness
Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications
State Space Collapse in Many-Server Diffusion Limits of Parallel Server Systems
Mathematics of Operations Research
Nurse Staffing in Medical Units: A Queueing Perspective
Operations Research
Hi-index | 0.01 |
The interface between an emergency department and internal wards is often a hospital's bottleneck. Motivated by this interaction in an anonymous hospital, we analyze queueing systems with heterogeneous server pools, where the pools represent the wards, and the servers are beds. Our queueing system, with a single centralized queue and several server pools, forms an inverted-V model. We introduce the randomized most-idle (RMI) routing policy and analyze it in the quality-and efficiency-driven regime, which is natural in our setting. The RMI policy results in the same server fairness (measured by idleness ratios) as the longest-idle-server-first (LISF) policy, which is commonly used in call centers and considered fair. However, the RMI policy utilizes only the information on the number of idle servers in different pools, whereas the LISF policy requires information that is unavailable in hospitals on a real-time basis. This paper was accepted by Assaf Zeevi, stochastic models and simulation.