ORIE Colloquium on 11/9/2012 - Jim Dai - Queues in Service Systems: Customer Abandonment and Diffusion Approximations

Jim Dai (Cornell ORIE) - Queues in Service Systems: Customer Abandonment and Diffusion Approximations Tuesday, September 11, 2012 at 4:15pm Frank H. T. Rhodes Hall, 253 Parallel-server queues with customer abandonment serve as a building block to model service systems. Such a queue is able to be operated in the quality- and efficiency-driven (QED) regime to achieve both quality of service and high server utilization. We survey recent results for these queues. They include insensitivity of patience time distribution, data-driven modeling of customer abandonment, diffusion models as a practical tool for performance analysis. This talk is based on joint work with Shuangchi He (National University of Singapore).