Priority assignment under imperfect information on customer type identities

In many service systems, customers are not served in the order they arrive, but according to a priority scheme that ranks them with respect to their relative ‘importance.’ However, it may not be an easy task to determine the importance level of customers, especially when decisions need to be made under limited information. A typical example is from health care: When triage nurses classify patients into different priority groups, they must promptly determine each patient's criticality levels with only partial information on their conditions.