Title: A Markovian multi-server queuing model with retention of reneged customers and balking

Authors: Rakesh Kumar; Sumeet Kumar Sharma

Addresses: School of Mathematics, Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Sub-Post Office, University Campus-182320, Katra, Jammu and Kashmir, India ' School of Mathematics, Shri Mata Vaishno Devi University, Sub-Post Office, University Campus-182320, Katra, Jammu and Kashmir, India

Abstract: In today's competitive world, customer's impatience has become a serious problem. Firms are employing a number of strategies to retain their customers. Recently, Kumar and Sharma (2013) studied a finite capacity, Markovian multi-server queuing system which deals with the retention of reneged customers. The customer's impatience may occur in the form of balking also. In this paper, we extend the work of Kumar and Sharma (2013) by including balking to take into consideration the broader perspective of customer's impatience. The model is solved iteratively to obtain the steady-state probabilities of system size. Some useful performance measures are derived, and the effect of the probability of retaining the reneged customers on various performance measures is studied numerically. Finally, some important queuing models are derived as special cases of this model.

Keywords: customer retention; reneged customers; finite capacity; multi-server queuing models; Markovian queuing model; steady-state solution; performance measures; balking; customer impatience.

DOI: 10.1504/IJOR.2014.063150

International Journal of Operational Research, 2014 Vol.20 No.4, pp.427 - 438

Received: 25 Aug 2012
Accepted: 17 Dec 2012
Published online: 29 Jul 2014 *

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