Service Rate Control in Queues with Abandonments

TL;DR

This paper analyzes optimal service rate control in Markovian queues with customer abandonments, providing structural results, an efficient algorithm, and convergence properties for systems with finite and infinite buffers.

Contribution

It characterizes the structure of optimal service rate policies, especially their monotonicity, and develops an efficient policy iteration algorithm for both finite and infinite buffer systems.

Findings

Optimal policy is monotone for infinite buffer systems.

Optimal actions can be reduced to the lower boundary of the convex hull.

The optimal service rate converges at infinity, enabling state space truncation.

Abstract

We consider a Markovian single server queue with impatient customers. There is a customer abandonment cost and a holding cost for customers in the system. We consider two versions of the problem. In the first version, customers pay a reward at the time of arrival whereas in the second version, reward is received at the time of service completion. Service rate attains values in a compact set and there is a cost associated with each service rate. Under these assumptions, our objective is to characterize the service rate policy that maximizes the infinite-horizon discounted reward and the long-run average reward. We show that for systems with an infinite buffer, the optimal service rate policy is monotone. However, the optimal policy is not necessarily monotone when capacity is finite. Furthermore, we prove that the set of possible optimal actions can be reduced to the lower boundary of the convex hull of the action space and develop an efficient policy iteration algorithm. Finally, we show that the optimal service rate converges as the state goes to infinity which allows us to truncate the state space to numerically compute the optimal service rate when system has infinite buffer space.