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RUTCOR Colloquia - October 20, 2005
Speaker: Susan Xu
Affiliation: Penn State University, Supply Chain and Information Systems
Title: Service Performance Analysis and Improvement for a Ticket Queue with Balking Customers
Time: 1:30 - 2:30 PM
Location: RUTCOR Building - Room 139, Rutgers University, Busch Campus, Piscataway, NJ
Abstract:
This paper considers a ticket queueing management system: each customer is
at arrival issued a numbered ticket while the number being served is on
display. An arriving customer would balk if the difference between his
ticket number and the display number is greater than his patience level.
Ticket management systems have been developed and widely adopted in
service systems such as banks, theme parks, tax, visa, and motor vehicle
offices, etc. However, academic research on such systems is scant. We
construct a Markov chain model of the ticket queue and develop a two-step
procedure to compute its steady state distribution. As the exact
computation is exponentially time and memory space consuming, we propose a
polynomial time algorithm to evaluate an approximated system and
demonstrate its effectiveness. We show that the ticket and corresponding
physical queues would have significantly different balking probabilities
when the customer's patience level is low and the system's traffic
intensity is high. We also propose an improvement to the ticket queue by
providing each customer with the information of the expected waiting time
conditioned on his observed number difference; the improvement is shown to
raise the performance of the ticket queue to the level of the physical
queue.
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