Related papers: To Wait or Not to Wait: Two-way Functional Hazards…
We consider an M/M/1 feedback queue in which service attempts may fail, requiring the customer to rejoin the queue. Arriving customers act strategically, deciding whether to join the queue based on a threshold strategy that depends on the…
Delay or queue length information has the potential to influence the decision of a customer to use a service system. Thus, it is imperative for service system managers to understand how the information that they provide will affect the…
A key operational challenge for call centers is to decide, in real time, which waiting customer should be served by which available agent. This is known as skill-based routing, and the decision becomes especially difficult in large systems…
Call centers' managers are interested in obtaining accurate point and distributional forecasts of call arrivals in order to achieve an optimal balance between service quality and operating costs. We present a strategy for selecting forecast…
This study introduces an innovative method for analyzing the impact of various interventions on customer churn, using the potential outcomes framework. We present a new causal model, the tensorized latent factor block hazard model, which…
We study a make-to-order system with a finite set of customers. Production is stochastic with a nonlinear dependence between the ordered quantity and the production rate. Customers may have to queue until their turn arrives, and therefore…
Teams of networked autonomous agents have been used in a number of applications, such as mobile sensor networks and intelligent transportation systems. However, in such systems, the effect of faults and errors in one or more of the…
We study systems with two classes of impatient customers who differ across the classes in their distribution of service times and patience times. The customers are served on a first-come, first served basis (FCFS) regardless of their class.…
Understanding how delayed information impacts queueing systems is an important area of research. However, much of the current literature neglects one important feature of many queueing systems, namely non-stationary arrivals. Non-stationary…
We introduce a new method for forecasting emergency call arrival rates that combines integer-valued time series models with a dynamic latent factor structure. Covariate information is captured via simple constraints on the factor loadings.…
Scheduling of service requests in Cloud computing has traditionally focused on the reduction of pre-service wait, generally termed as waiting time. Under certain conditions such as peak load, however, it is not always possible to give…
The current Internet design is not capable to support communications in environments characterized by very long delays and frequent network partitions. To allow devices to communicate in such environments, delay-tolerant networking…
This paper studies a service system in which arriving customers are provided with information about the delay they will experience. Based on this information they decide to wait for service or to leave the system. Specifically, every…
Agent faults pose a significant threat to the performance of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms, introducing two key challenges. First, agents often struggle to extract critical information from the chaotic state space…
Functional data is a powerful tool for capturing and analyzing complex patterns and relationships in a variety of fields, allowing for more precise modeling, visualization, and decision-making. For example, in healthcare, functional data…
We consider a multi-class queueing model of a telephone call center, in which a system manager dynamically allocates available servers to customer calls. Calls can terminate through either service completion or customer abandonment, and the…
The potential demand in the market and customers' perception of service value are crucial factors in pricing strategies, resource allocation, and other operational decisions. However, this information is typically private and not readily…
Average hold time is a concern for call centers because it affects customer satisfaction. Contact centers should instruct their agents to use special on-hold scripts to maintain positive interactions with clients. This study presents a…
Digital technologies are becoming ubiquitous while their impact increases. A growing part of this impact happens far away from the end users, in networks or data centers, contributing to a rebound effect. A solution for a more responsible…
We present H-TD2: Hybrid Temporal Difference Learning for Taxi Dispatch, a model-free, adaptive decision-making algorithm to coordinate a large fleet of automated taxis in a dynamic urban environment to minimize expected customer waiting…