2019/06/13 by Yiannis Dimitrakopoulos, Dimitrakopoulos, Yiannis, Antonis Economou +3 · 1 citation
Business, Management and Accounting · Engineering · Social Sciences · #Advanced Queuing Theory Analysis #Transportation and Mobility Innovations #Transportation Planning and Optimization
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1906.05628
Strategic customer behavior is strongly influenced by the level of\ninformation that is provided to customers. Hence, to optimize the design of\nqueueing systems, many studies consider various versions of the same service\nmodel and compare them under different information structures. In particular,\ntwo extreme versions are usually considered and compared: the observable in\nwhich customers are informed about the number of customers in the system and\nthe unobservable in which they are only informed about the system parameters,≠.g., arrival and service rates. In the present work, we study a model that\nbridges these two versions. More concretely, we assume that the system\nalternates between observable and unobservable periods. We characterize and\ncompute customer equilibrium joining/balking strategies and show that the\npresent model unifies and extends existing approaches of both heterogeneously\nobservable models and models with delayed observations. More importantly, our\nfindings indicate that an alternating information structure implies in general\nhigher equilibrium throughput and social welfare in comparison to both the\nobservable and unobservable cases. We complement our results with numerical\nexperiments and provide managerial insight on the optimal control of the system\nparameters.\n