Server Staffing to Meet Time-Varying Demand
Otis B. Jennings, Avishai Mandelbaum, William A. Massey, Ward Whitt
Management Science · 1996 · Volume 42 · Issue 10
Abstract
We consider a multiserver service system with general nonstationary arrival and service-time processes in which s ( t ), the number of servers as a function of time, needs to be selected to meet projected loads. We try to choose s ( t ) so that the probability of a delay (before beginning service) hits or falls just below a target probability at all times. We develop an approximate procedure based on a time-dependent normal distribution, where the mean and variance are determined by infinite-server approximations. We demonstrate that this approximation is effective by making comparisons with the exact numerical solution of the Markovian M t / M / s t model.
Keywords
operator staffing, queues, nonstationary queues, queues with time-dependent arrival rates, multiserver queues, infinite-server queues, capacity planning
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