Predicting Queueing Delays

This paper investigates the possibility of predicting each customer's waiting time in queue before starting service in a multiserver service system with the first-come first-served service discipline, such as a telephone call center. A predicted waiting-time distribution or an appropriate summary statistic such as the mean or the 90th percentile may be communicated to the customer upon arrival and possibly thereafter in order to improve customer satisfaction. The predicted waiting-time distribution may also be used by the service provider to better manage the service system, e.g., to help decide when to add additional service agents. The possibility of making reliable predictions is enhanced by exploiting information about system state, including the number of customers in the system ahead of the current customer. Additional information beyond the number of customers in the system may be obtained by classifying customers and the service agents to which they are assigned. For nonexponential service times, the elapsed service times of customers in service can often be used to advantage to compute conditional-remaining-service-time distributions. Approximations are proposed to convert the distributions of remaining service times into the distribution of the desired customer waiting time. The analysis reveals the advantage from exploiting additional information.