STRATEGIC CUSTOMERS IN MARKOVIAN QUEUES WITH VACATIONS AND SYNCHRONIZED ABANDONMENT

We study impatient customers’ joining strategies in a single-server Markovian queue with synchronized abandonment and multiple vacations. Customers receive the system information upon arrival, and decide whether to join or balk, based on a linear reward-cost structure under the acquired information. Waiting customers are served in a first-come-first-serve discipline, and no service is rendered during vacation. Server’s vacation becomes the cause of impatience for the waiting customers, which leads to synchronous abandonment at the end of vacation. That is, customers consider simultaneously but independent of others, whether to renege the system or to remain. We are interested to study the effect of both information and reneging choice on the balking strategies of impatient customers. We examine the customers’ equilibrium and socially optimal balking strategies under four cases of information: fully/almost observable and fully/almost unobservable cases, assuming the linear reward-cost structure. We compare the social benefits under all the information policies.

Equilibrium and Socially Optimal Balking Strategies in Markovian Queues with Vacations and Sequential Abandonment

In this paper, we consider customers’ equilibrium and socially optimal behavior in a single-server Markovian queue with multiple vacations and sequential abandonments. Upon arrival customers decide for themselves whether to join or balk, based on the level of information available to them. During the server’s vacation, present customers become impatient and decide sequentially whether they will abandon the system or not upon the availability of a secondary transport facility. Assuming the linear reward-cost structure, we analyze the equilibrium balking strategies of customers under four cases: fully and almost observable as well as fully and almost unobservable. In all the above cases, the individual and social optimal strategies are derived. Finally, the dependence of performance measures on system parameters are demonstrated via numerical experiments.

A fixed-size batch service queue with vacations

The paper deals with batch service queues with vacations in which customers arrive according to a Poisson process. Decomposition method is used to derive the queue length distributions both for single and multiple vacation cases. The authors look at other decomposition techniques and discuss some related open problems.