Queueing and quality service

This paper develops methodology that provides a way of incorporating quality management concepts of customer’s satisfaction into the queue design. It reviews Garvin’s quality dimensions of performance, flexibility, serviceability, reliability, courtesy and appearance and interprets these in a queueing context. The last part of the paper deals with a queue-design that addresses some of those quality issues. It incorporates the concepts of alarm and action lines into the queueing model, through what is called, rule-1: when the number of customers in the system is equal or larger than b (action line) add k extra servers, when it is equal to smaller than a (alarm line) remove k servers (a<b). A queueing model with c exponential identical servers and Poisson arrivals, operating under rule-1, is studied. The equilibrium distribution of the state of the two-dimensional Markov process that characterizes the queueing system is derived. Some first passage time problems useful in the quality design of the queueing system are solved.