Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/106738
Title: Using strategic idleness to improve customer service experience in service networks
Authors: Baron, Opher
Berman, Oded
Krass, Dmitry
Wang, Jianfu
Keywords: DRNTU::Business::Operations management
Issue Date: 2014
Source: Baron, O., Berman, O., Krass, D., & Wang, J. (2014). Using strategic idleness to improve customer service experience in service networks. Operations research, 62(1), 123-140.
Series/Report no.: Operations research
Abstract: The most common measure of waiting time is the overall expected waiting time for service. However, in service networks the perception of waiting may also depend on how it is distributed among different stations. Therefore, reducing the probability of a long wait at any station may be important in improving customers' perception of service quality. In a single-station queue it is known that the policy that minimizes the waiting time and the probability of long waits is nonidling. However, this is not necessarily the case for queueing networks with several stations. We present a family of threshold-based policies (TBPs) that strategically idle some stations. We demonstrate the advantage of strategically idling by applying TBP in a network with two single-server queues in tandem. We provide closed form results for the special case where the first station has infinite capacity and develop efficient algorithms when this is not the case. We compare TBPs with the nonidling and Kanban policies, and we discuss when a TBP is advantageous. Using simulation, we demonstrate that the analytical insights for the two-station case hold for a three-station serial queue as well.
URI: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/106738
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/25077
DOI: 10.1287/opre.2013.1236
Schools: Nanyang Business School 
Rights: © 2014 Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). This is the author created version of a work that has been peer reviewed and accepted for publication by Operations Research, Institute for Operations Research and the Mangement Sciences (INFORMS). It incorporates referee’s comments but changes resulting from the publishing process, such as copyediting, structural formatting, may not be reflected in this document. The published version is available at: [http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.2013.1236].
Fulltext Permission: open
Fulltext Availability: With Fulltext
Appears in Collections:NBS Journal Articles

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