Pricing and resource allocation of a queueing service system

• Main Authors: Chung-Ming Yan, 嚴崇銘
• Other Authors: Kuo-Hwa Chang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2001
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/67755900632509854251

碩士 === 中原大學 === 工業工程研究所 === 89 === Under the highly competitive business circumstances, only the enterprise providing the high quality service(products) can be favored by consumers. Therefore, the most important thing to the system administrator is how to attract customers and improve the quality of service for meeting the requirements of the attracted customers. Usually, the system administrator wants to maximize net profits and the utilization of the servers and the system. But it is an extremely difficult challenge for the system administrator to have the customer enjoy the reasonable service while the system also can gain more profit under the limited capacity resource. For some system, there are some potential customers willing to pay more money for the "express service" in some queueing service system. Therefore, in the busy system, if the system with such pricing mechanism may induce more high-profit VIP customers and may utilize the service resource more efficiently. We consider a finite-capacity and multi-servers queueing service system(flexible servers and temporary servers). And we assume that the system can reserve a certain number of servers to serves VIP customers and prevent the VIP customers from losing. But the VIP customers can still be lost when all reserved servers are busy(this cause balking). However, the system may promise to refund some fund for the lost VIP customers. The refund can be regarded as a compensation to the customer for the unwilling loss. This may attract more ordinary customers to become VIP customers. In this way, the system also may lower the employee's utilization and alleviate their pressure. Finally, the system implementing this pricing mechanism can increase benefits along with the customers. In this study, we discuss the problem of how to decide the price, refund for the express service and discuss the problem of the allocations of the servers in order to maximize the total profit for the given quality of services.