Fall 2005 Seminar Series

DATE: Thursday, November 3, 2005
LOCATION: E40-298
TIME: 4:15pm
Reception immediately following in the Philip M. Morse Reading Room, E40-106

SPEAKER:
Ward Whitt
Professor
IEOR Department
Columbia University

TITLE
Fluid Approximations for Many-Server Queues
with Abandonment and their Applications

ABSTRACT
Motivated by a desire to better understand the performance of customer contact centers, we have developed a deterministic fluid approximation for a multi-server queue with customer abandonment, allowing non-exponential service-time and time-to-abandon distributions (the M/GI/s+GI model). The fluid approximation is asymptotically correct as the arrival rate and number of servers increase, under regularity conditions. Unlike fluid models where the number of servers is held fixed, in this fluid model the service-time and time-to-abandon distributions beyond their means play a critical role in the equilibrium behavior. We show how the fluid model can be applied, e.g., to study the impact of uncertain arrival rate and absenteeism.