Waiting time analysis in a finite-capacity multi-server systems with dynamic priorities, dynamically evolving customer types, and abandonment

In many service systems, an estimation of customers' waiting times for the service can assist in decision making focused on enhancing the operational efficiency, improving the customers' experience, and ensuring efficient resource allocation.

In this paper, we study the customers' waiting times in a finite-capacity service system with a finite number of parallel servers and a shared waiting area.

We consider two customer types, Type 1 and Type 2, with dynamic admission priorities, dynamically evolving customer type, and abandonment.

We model the system under such assumptions using a continuous-time Markov chain (CTMC) and develop a methodology based on Krylov subspace approximation methods to evaluate the conditional waiting time distributions of Type 1 and Type 2 customers in the system.

This methodology (CTMC-Krylov) offers a scalable computational approach that is well suited for analysing large complex systems.

Next, we model this system using a quasi-birth-and-death (QBD) process and derive analytical expressions building on matrix-analytic methods to evaluate the conditional and long-run waiting time distributions using recursion.

We illustrate the practical applicability of our models in a hospital system through a suite of numerical examples based on a large dataset obtained from a tertiary referral hospital in Australia, considering two types of patients, complex (Type 1) and other (Type 2).