An optimal deterministic control policy of servers in front and back rooms with a variable number of switching points and switching costs

摘要：

In this paper we consider a retail service facility with cross-trained workers who can perform operations in both the front room and back room.Workers are brought from the back room to the front room and vice versa depending on the number of customers in the system.A loss of productivity occurs when a worker returns to the back room.Two problems are studied.In the rst problem,given the number of workers available,we determine an optimal deterministic switching policy so that the expected number of customers in queue is minimized subject to a constraint ensuring that there is a sufcient workforce to fulll the functions in the back room.In the second problem,the number of workers needed is minimized subject to an additional constraint requiring that the expected number of customers waiting in queue is bounded above by a given threshold value.Exact solution procedures are developed and illustrative numerical examples are presented.

关键词： Queuing control Optimization Queuing theory Markov decision process

作者: Jiamin Wang

作者单位: College of Management,Long Island University 720 Northern Boulevard,Brookville,NY 11548,USA

会议类型: 国际会议

会议名称: International Conference on Modelling,Identification and Control(模拟、鉴定、控制国际会议)

会议地点: 上海

会议语种:英文

在线出版日期: 2008-06-29（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）