Service Rate Control in Queues with Abandonments

Abstract

We consider a Markovian single server queue with impatient customers. There is a customer abandonment cost and a holding cost for customers in the system. We consider two versions of the problem. In the first version, customers pay a reward at the time of arrival whereas in the second version, reward is received at the time of service completion. Service rate attains values in a compact set and there is a cost associated with each service rate. Under these assumptions, our objective is to characterize the service rate policy that maximizes the infinite-horizon discounted reward and the long-run average reward. We show that for systems with an infinite buffer, the optimal service rate policy is monotone. However, the optimal policy is not necessarily monotone when the buffer size is finite. Furthermore, we prove that the set of possible optimal actions can be reduced to the lower boundary of the convex hull of the action space and develop an efficient policy iteration algorithm. Finally, we prove that the optimal service rate converges as the state tends to infinity. This property enables us to truncate the state space, facilitating the numerical computation of the optimal rate when the buffer space is infinite.