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To Pool or Not to Pool: Queueing Design for Large-Scale Service Systems

Ping Cao¹; Shuangchi He²; Junfei Huang³; Yunan Liu⁴

¹ School of Management, University of Science and Technology of China, 230026 Hefei, China · ² Department of Industrial Systems Engineering and Management, National University of Singapore, Singapore 117576; · ³ Department of Decision Sciences and Managerial Economics, CUHK Business School, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, Hong Kong · ⁴ Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, North Carolina 27695

In large-scale service systems, it is a common practice to organize customers with similar service requirements into a single queue served by a group of servers. This pooled queue structure is deemed highly efficient because the servers’ idleness will be minimized. In “To Pool or Not to Pool: Queueing Design for Large-Scale Service Systems,” Cao, He, Huang, and Liu demonstrate that the dedicated queue structure, under which each server has her own queue, could be more advantageous for improving the system’s service level. Moreover, the servers’ additional idleness induced by the dedicated queue structure will be negligible when the system scale is large. By solving a staffing problem, this study also intends to help service system designers answer the following question: To achieve a specified service-level objective in a more efficient manner, should the servers have a common queue or separate queues?

DOI

10.1287/opre.2019.1976

Volume

69 (6)

Pages

1866-1885

Language

en

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