Server assignment policies in queues with customer abandonments

Excerpt

Queueing systems with customer abandonments drew a lot of attention in the literature (see [1, 8], and [9] for earlier exact analysis). Some more recent exact results can be found in [10, 11, 14, 16, 18], and [22]. Due to interest in call centers, many researchers have considered asymptotic analysis (see [13] and [25]) and the determination of asymptotically optimal staffing decisions in parallel queues with abandonments (see [6, 7, 12, 17, 21], and [23]). Similarly, [4] uses fluid and diffusion approximations in a tandem setting. However, the literature on exact optimal server assignment policies in queues with abandonments is scarce. The authors of [5, 15, 19] and [20] consider single-stage queues. To the best of our knowledge, [2, 24, 26], and [27, 28] are the only papers that consider exact analysis of assignment of servers in tandem queues with abandonments. The objective of this note is to draw attention to this void in the literature and identify a class of queueing systems for which obtaining exact results is possible. …