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Admission control in a two-class loss system with periodically varying parameters and abandonments

Author

Listed:
  • Gabriel Zayas-Cabán

    (University of Wisconsin)

  • Mark E. Lewis

    (Cornell University)

Abstract

Motivated by service systems, such as telephone call centers and emergency departments, we consider admission control for a two-class multi-server loss system with periodically varying parameters and customers who may abandon from service. Assuming mild conditions for the parameters, a dynamic programming formulation is developed. We show that under the infinite horizon discounted problem, there exists an optimal threshold policy and provide conditions for a customer class to be preferred for each fixed time, extending stationary results to the non-stationary setting. We approximate the non-stationary problem by discretizing the time horizon into equally spaced intervals and examine how policies for this approximation change as a function of time and parameters numerically. We compare the performance of these approximations with several admission policies used in practice in a discrete-event simulation study. We show that simpler admission policies that ignore non-stationarity or abandonments lead to significant losses in rewards.

Suggested Citation

  • Gabriel Zayas-Cabán & Mark E. Lewis, 2020. "Admission control in a two-class loss system with periodically varying parameters and abandonments," Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications, Springer, vol. 94(1), pages 175-210, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:queues:v:94:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s11134-019-09620-3
    DOI: 10.1007/s11134-019-09620-3
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

    1. Barış Ata & Xiaoshan Peng, 2020. "An Optimal Callback Policy for General Arrival Processes: A Pathwise Analysis," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 68(2), pages 327-347, March.

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