Optimal Scheduling of Proactive Service with Customer Deterioration and Improvement

Service systems are typically limited resource environments where scarce capacity is reserved for the most urgent customers. However, there has been a growing interest in the use of proactive service when a less urgent customer may become urgent while waiting. On one hand, providing service for customers when they are less urgent could mean that fewer resources are needed to fulfill their service requirement. On the other hand, using limited capacity for customers who may never need the service in the future takes the capacity away from other more urgent customers who need it now. To understand this tension, we propose a multiserver queueing model with two customer classes: moderate and urgent. We allow customers to transition classes while waiting. In this setting, we characterize how moderate and urgent customers should be prioritized for service when proactive service for moderate customers is an option. We identify an index, the modified$c\mu /\theta$-index, which plays an important role in determining the optimal scheduling policy. This index lends itself to an intuitive interpretation of how to balance holding costs, service times, abandonments, and transitions between customer classes.

This paper was accepted by David Simchi-Levi, stochastic models and simulation.