UCL School of Management

Research project

Delay announcements in service systems

Summary

People spend a long time waiting in line, e.g., at airports, banks, amusement parks, etc, and these long waits are often irritating and unpleasant. However, studies have shown that people’s frustration with waiting is reduced if they are given information, in advance, about their anticipated waits. One way to do so is via announcements of upcoming delays. To make effective announcements, we need to accurately predict future delays based on information about the present system state. We use queueing theory to propose such delay predictors, and show that our predictors are accurate and useful via both queueing analysis and simulation.

Relevance

This research has both practical and academic dimensions. From a practical perspective, the alternative delay predictors that we propose are simple and effective. By simple, we mean that they rely on information which is easy to obtain in practice (queue length, previous waiting times, etc), and by effective we mean that they predict delays accurately. Thus, they can easily be used in a real-life context. From a theoretical perspective, we derived several queueing theoretic results, mostly regarding the accuracy of the different announcement schemes; such results provide a deeper understanding of the delay announcement problem in general.   

Selected publications

Ibrahim, R., & Whitt, W. (2009). Real-Time Delay Estimation in Overloaded Multiserver Queues with Abandonments. Manag. Sci., 55, 1729-1742. doi:10.1287/mnsc.1090.1041
Ibrahim, R., & Whitt, W. (2008). REal-time delay estimation in call centers. WSC, 2876-2883. WSC.
Ibrahim, R., & Whitt, W. (2009). Real-Time Delay Estimation Based on Delay History. Manuf. Serv. Oper. Manag., 11, 397-415. doi:10.1287/msom.1080.0223
Ibrahim, R., & Whitt, W. (2010). Delay predictors for customer service systems with time-varying parameters. WSC, 2375-2386. IEEE.
Ibrahim, R., & Whitt, W. (2011). Real-time delay estimation based on delay history in many-server service systems with time-varying arrivals. Production and Operations Management, 20 (5), 654-667. doi:10.1111/j.1937-5956.2010.01196.x
Ibrahim, R., & Whitt, W. (2011). Wait-time predictors for customer service systems with time-varying demand and capacity. Operations Research, 59 (5), 1106-1118. doi:10.1287/opre.1110.0974
Ibrahim, R., Armony, M., & Bassamboo, A. (2016). Does the Past Predict the Future? The Case of Delay Announcements in Service Systems. Management Science. doi:10.1287/mnsc.2016.2425
Ibrahim, R. (2018). Sharing delay information in service systems: a literature survey. Queueing Systems, 1-31. doi:10.1007/s11134-018-9577-y
Ibrahim, R., & Bassamboo, A. (2020). A General Framework to Compare Announcement Accuracy: Static vs LES-based Announcement. Management Science, 0. doi:10.1287/mnsc.2020.3722

Link to the publication’s UCL Discovery page

Last updated Friday, 15 January 2021

Author

Research groups

Operations & Technology

Research areas

Management science

Research topics

Applied probability; Applied stochastic modelling; Queueing theory