A service system with on-demand agent invitations

We consider a service system where agents are invited on-demand. Customers arrive exogenously as a Poisson process and join a customer queue upon arrival if no agent is available. Agents decide to accept or decline invitations after some exponentially distributed random time, and join an agent queue upon invitation acceptance if no customer is waiting. A customer and an agent are matched in the order of customer arrival and agent invitation acceptance under the non-idling condition, and will leave the system simultaneously once matched (service times are irrelevant here). We consider a feedback-based adaptive agent invitation scheme, which controls the number of pending agent invitations, depending on the customer and/or agent queue lengths and their changes. The system process has two components – ‘the difference between agent and customer queues’ and ‘the number of pending invitations’, and is a countable continuous-time Markov chain. For the case when the customer arriva...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: QUESTA
• Authors: Guodong Pang, Alexander L. Stolyar
• Keywords: QUESTA 2016