COOPERATION IN SERVICE SYSTEMS

摘要

We study a cost allocation problem in service management, where a group of servers, each characterized by its capacity and stream of customers, may cooperate and generate a single "pooled" server system with an arrival/service rate being the sum of the respective individual rates. The cost of a coalition is the equilibrium mean number of customers in the "pooled" system. We define the problem as a transferable utility cooperative game, and show that the grand coalition is beneficial. We fully characterize the non-negative core of the game, albeit the fact that the game is neither monotone nor concave. We also study core allocations in which some servers pay the others in order to make them join the coalition.