Expected Waiting Time in Service Operations: Accounting for State Completion Rates of Individuals

摘要

Traditional queuing analysis is oftne used in determining staffing requirements for labor schedules in service operations. This analysis assumes tht the service rates of all servers in the system are identical. In practice, however, it is often the case that servers have differnet service rates. In this paper, we show the effect on standard queuing formulae of relaxing the assumption of homogeneous service rates. The derivation shows that when state completion rates of individuals are not considered, managers of the service system may make incorrect assumptions about the queuing system.