Classes

1. Wednesday, January 18: Introduction to Service Engineering. Introductory Lecture by Galit Yom-Tov.
   • A queueing science perspective on service systems: looking at system data: call centers and hospitals. (As with all references, follow the citation trail backward and forward in time to see more literature.)
     • Statistical analysis of a telephone call center: a queueing-science perspective. by Larry Brown, Noah Gans, Avishai Mandelbaum, Anat Sakov, Haipeng Shen, Sergey Zeltyn and Linda Zhao, Journal of the American Statistical Association (JASA) vol. 100, 2005, pp. 36--50.

     • Patient Flow in Hospitals: A Data-Based Queueing-Science Perspective. by Mor Armony, Shlomo Israeli, Avishai Mandelbaum, Yariv Marmor, Yulia Tseytlin and GY. Submitted to Stochastic Systems, November 2011.

   • Lectures 2-6 by Ward Whitt

2. Wednesday, January 25: Viewing a Complex System as an Open Queueing Network.
   • The Queueing Network Analyzer. by WW, Bell System Technical Journal, vol. 62, No. 9, November 1983, pp. 2779-2815.

3. Wednesday, February 1: More on the Performance of a Single-Server Queue: Superposition Processes, Indices of Dispersion and Time Scales
   • Characterizing Superposition Arrival Processes in Packet Multiplexers for Voice and Data. by K. Sriram and WW, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, vol. SAC-4, No. 6, September 1986, pp. 833-846. (A superposition arrival process looks like something different in different time scales, a first-order issue for system performance; see Table 3.)

   • Additional papers

4. Wednesday, February 8: Measurements and Many-Server Queues.

   • Understanding the Efficiency of Multi-Server Service Systems. by WW, Management Science, vol. 38, No. 5, 1992, pp. 708-723.

   • The role of queueing models and data in performance analysis. Queueing models and data play an important role, but there is more to the full performance analysis process.

5. Wednesday, February 15: Many-Server Queues with Time-Varying Arrival Rates.

   • Coping with Time-Varying Demand when Setting Staffing Requirements for a Service System. by Linda V. Green, Peter J. Kolesar and WW, Production and Operations Management (POMS), vol. 16, No. 1, January-February 2007, pp. 13-39.

   • The Physics of The Mt/G/infty Queue. by Stephen G. Eick, William A. Massey and WW, Operations Research, vol. 41, No. 4, 1993, pp. 731-742.

   • Server Staffing to Meet Time-Varying Demand. by Otis B. Jennings, Avishai Mandelbaum, William A. Massey and WW, Management Science, vol. 42, No. 10, 1996, pp. 1383-1394.

6. Wednesday, February 22: Staffing to Stabilize Performance in Many-Server Queues with Time-Varying Arrival Rates.
   • Papers Discussed

7. Wednesday, February 29: Fluid Models for Large-Scale Service Systems Experiencing Periods of Overloading

   • Fluid Models for Multiserver Queues with Abandonments. by WW, Operations Research, vol. 54, No. 1, 2006, pp. 37-54.

   • The G_t/GI/s_t+GI Many-Server Fluid Queue. by Yunan Liu (Columbia PhD, now at North Carolina State University) and WW, Queueing Systems, 2012, forthcoming.

8. Wednesday, March 7: Predicting Queueing Delays.

   • Wait Time Predictors for Customer Service Systems with Time-Varying Demand and Capacity, by Rouba E. Ibrahim (Columbia PhD, now at McGill University) and WW, Operations Research, vol. 59, September-October 2011, pp. 1106-1118.

9. Wednesday, March 14: NO CLASS (Week of March 12-16 is Spring Recess.)

10. Wednesday, March 21: Blind Fair Routing in Large-Scale Service Systems. by Professor Mor Armony from NYU. .
    • Papers Discussed:
      • Fair Dynamic Routing in Large-Scale Heterogeneous-Server Systems. by Mor Armony and Amy R. Ward, Operations Research 58(3), 2010, pp. 624-637.

      • Blind Fair Routing in Large-Scale Service Systems. by Mor Armony and Amy R. Ward, NYU and USC, 2011.

11. Wednesday, March 28: Skewness Variance Approximation for Dynamic Rate Multi-Server Queues with Abandonment, by Professor William A. Massey and Jamol Pender from Princeton University.

12. Wednesday, April 4: Statistical Analysis with Little's Law, by Song-Hee Kim, PhD student, Columbia University.

    • Statistical Analysis with Little's Law by Song-Hee Kim and WW, submitted to Operations Research, 2012.

    • Statistical Analysis with Little's Law, Supplementary Material: More on the Call Center Data. by Song-Hee Kim and WW, submitted to Operations Research, 2012.

    • A Review of L = W and Extensions. by WW, Queueing Systems, vol. 9, No. 3, 1991, pp. 235-268. Plus Correction Note on L = W. by WW, Queueing Systems, vol. 12, No. 4, 1992, pp. 431-432.

13. Wednesday, April 11: No class. Meet with Instructors to discuss projects.

14. Wednesday, April 18: No class. Meet with Instructors to discuss projects.

15. Wednesday, April 25: Andrew Li and Evangelia Skiani

    • Queues with Dependent Service Times, by Andrew Li, Columbia BS 2012, PhD student MIT fall 2012.

      Background reading:

      • Heavy Traffic Approximations for Service Systems with Blocking. by WW, AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal, vol. 63, No. 4, May-June 1984, pp. 689-708.

      • The Impact of Dependent Service Times on Large-Scale Service Systems. by Guodong Pang and WW, Manufacturing and Service Operations Management, Articles in Advance, 2012.

      The Queue Inference Engine: Applying QIE to Deduce Hospital Queue Statistics from Transactional Data, by Evangelia Skiani, PhD student in EE
      Background reading:

      • The Queue Inference Engine: Deducing Queue Statistics from Transactional Data. By Richard C. Larson, Management Science, Vol. 36, 1990, pp. 586-601.

      • Patient Flow in Hospitals: A Data-Based Queueing-Science Perspective. by Mor Armony, Shlomo Israeli, Avishai Mandelbaum, Yariv Marmor, Yulia Tseytlin and GY. Submitted to Stochastic Systems, November 2011.

16. Wednesday, May 2: Jing Dong and Xinyun Chen

    Empirical Study of Customer Patience in a Call Center with an IVR, by Jing Dong

    Background reading:

    • The Palm/Erlang-A Queue, with Applications to Call Centers by Avishai Mandelbaum and Sergey Zeltyn, 2005.

    Simulation Techniques for the Diffusion Limits of Queueing Systems, by Xinyun Chen

    • Abstract

17. Friday, May 4: Yuqian Xu and Christos Zacharias

18. Wednesday, May 9: Daniel Guetta