Article ID: | iaor20073617 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 52 |
Issue: | 4 |
Start Page Number: | 527 |
End Page Number: | 545 |
Publication Date: | Jul 2004 |
Journal: | Operations Research |
Authors: | Maglaras Constantinos, Armony Mor |
Keywords: | service |
Motivated by practices in customer contact centers, we consider a system that ofters two modes of service: real-time and postponed with a delay guarantee. Customers are informed of anticipated delays and select their preferred option of service. The resulting system is a multiclass, multiserver queueing system with state-dependent arrival rates. We propose an estimation scheme for the anticipated real-time delay that is asymptotically correct, and a routing policy that is asymptotically optimal in the sense that it minimizes real-time delay subject to the deadline of the postponed service mode. We also show that our proposed state-dependent scheme performs better than a system in which customers make decisions based on steady-state waiting-time information. Our results are derived using an asymptotic analysis based on ‘many-server’ limits for systems with state-dependent parameters.