Understanding the marginal impact of customer flexibility |
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Authors: | Osman T. Akgun Rhonda Righter Ronald Wolff |
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Affiliation: | 1. Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, University of California, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA
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Abstract: | We study the marginal impact of customer flexibility in service systems. We consider a queueing system with multiple parallel servers, in which a proportion of customers are flexible and can go to any server, while the remainder require service at a particular server. We show that the stationary expected waiting time is decreasing and convex in the proportion of flexible customers. We also show, for a related Inventory Model, in which servers are never idle and can build up inventory, that convexity holds in a strong sample-path sense. Our results reinforce the idea that a little flexibility goes a long way. |
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