A service system with randomly behaving on-demand agents

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a real-time adaptive agent invitation scheme in a service system with randomly behaving on-demand agents, using fluid limit models and stability analysis to ensure small queues and efficient operation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel adaptive invitation scheme and provides stability conditions for the fluid limits, supported by numerical and simulation evidence.

Findings

Fluid limit trajectories exhibit complex behavior with different ODE regimes.

Sufficient local stability conditions are derived for the fluid limits.

Simulations confirm good performance when stability conditions are met.

Abstract

We consider a service system where agents (or, servers) are invited on-demand. Customers arrive as a Poisson process and join a customer queue. Customer service times are i.i.d. exponential. Agents' behavior is random in two respects. First, they can be invited into the system exogenously, and join the agent queue after a random time. Second, with some probability they rejoin the agent queue after a service completion, and otherwise leave the system. The objective is to design a real-time adaptive agent invitation scheme that keeps both customer and agent queues/waiting-times small. We study an adaptive scheme, which controls the number of pending agent invitations, based on queue-state feedback. We study the system process fluid limits, in the asymptotic regime where the customer arrival rate goes to infinity. The fluid limit trajectories have complicated behavior -- there are two domains where they follow different ODEs, and a "reflecting" boundary. We use the machinery of switched linear systems and common quadratic Lyapunov functions to approach the stability of fluid limits at the desired equilibrium point (with zero queues). We derive sufficient local stability conditions for the fluid limits. We conjecture that, for our model, local stability is in fact sufficient for global stability of fluid limits; the validity of this conjecture is supported by numerical and simulation experiments. When the local stability conditions do hold, simulations show good overall performance of the scheme.