Analysis and Comparison of Queues with Different
Levels of Delay Information
Pengfei Guo and Paul Zipkin
Information
about delays can enhance service quality in many industries. Delay information
can take many forms, with different degrees of precision. Different levels of
information have different effects on customers and so on
the overall system. To explore these effects, we consider a queue with balking
under three levels of delay information: no information, partial information
(the system occupancy) and full information (the exact waiting time). We assume
Poisson arrivals, independent service times and a single server. We show first
that, for a plausible customer-decision scheme, the objectives of both the
provider and the customers are proportional to a single measure, the
throughput. We then show how to compute the key performance measures in the
three systems, obtaining closed-form solutions for special cases. For
exponential service times, comparison of the three systems, analytical and
numerical, shows that more accurate delay information improves performance.