Delay predictors for customer service systems with time-varying parameters

  • Authors:
  • Rouba Ibrahim;Ward Whitt

  • Affiliations:
  • Columbia University, New York;Columbia University, New York

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the Winter Simulation Conference
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

Motivated by interest in making delay announcements in service systems, we develop new real-time delay predictors that effectively cope with customer abandonment and time-varying parameters. First, we focus on delay predictors exploiting recent customer delay history. We show that time-varying arrival rates can introduce significant prediction bias in delay-history-based predictors when the system experiences alternating periods of overload and underload. We then introduce a new delay-history-based predictor that effectively copes with time-varying arrival rates. Second, we consider a time-varying number of servers. We develop two new predictors which exploit an established deterministic fluid approximation for a many-server queueing model with time-varying demand and capacity. The new predictors effectively cope with those features, often observed in practice. Throughout, we use computer simulation to quantify the performance of the alternative delay predictors.