Transient Analysis for a Queuing System with Impatient Customers and Its Applications to the Pricing Strategy of a Video Website

Abstract

In this paper, we consider a queuing system with impatient customers, which includes infinite servers and two types of customers. During the service process, Type-1 customers may leave the system or upgrade to be Type-2 customers due to their impatience. By solving the partial differential equations, we obtain the generating functions of the transient distribution of the queue length, and many stationary performance measures are further derived. Then, as an application, we formulate an expected profit function for a video website, and maximize it by determining the optimal pricing strategy. Finally, numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the impacts of parameters on the optimal website profit.

Keywords

• queuing system
• impatient customers
• optimization
• pricing strategy