《SERVER_STAFFING_TO_MEET_TIME-VARYING_DEMAND》.pdfVIP

SERVER STAFFING TO MEET TIME-VARYING DEMAND by Otis B. Jennings,1 Avishai Mandelbaum, 2 William A. Massey3 and Ward Whitt4 ATT Bell Laboratories September 12, 1994 Revision: July 11, 1995 ________________ 1 School of Industrial and System Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332. This work was done while serving as a consultant to ATT Bell Laboratories. 2 Faculty of Industrial and Management Engineering, The Technion, Haiffa 32000, ISRAEL. This work was done while serving as a consultant to ATT Bell Laboratories. 3 ATT Bell Laboratories, Room 2C-120, Murray Hill, NJ 07974-0636. 4 ATT Bell Laboratories, Room 2C-178, Murray Hill, NJ 07974-0636. 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 / M / s t t model. Keywords: operator staffing, queues