On-Off Systems with Strategic Customers

Abstract

Motivated by applications such as urban traffic control and make-to-order systems, we study a fluid model of a single-server, on-off system that can accommodate multiple queues. The server visits each queue in order: when a queue is served, it is "on", and when the server is serving another queue or transitioning between queues, it is "off". Customers arrive over time, observe the state of the system, and decide whether to join. We consider two regimes for the formation of the on and off durations. In the exogenous setting, each queue's on and off durations are predetermined. We explicitly characterize the equilibrium outcome in closed form and give a compact linear program to compute the optimal on-off durations that maximizes total reward collected from serving customers. In the endogenous setting, the durations depend on customers' joining decisions under an exhaustive service policy where the server never leaves a non-empty queue. We show that an optimal policy in this case extends service beyond the first clearance for at most one queue. Using this property, we introduce a closed-form procedure that computes an optimal policy in no more than 2n steps for a system with n queues.