Abstract
In service industries, especially in some ticket windows at scenic spots, affected by congestion, some customers often find excuses or ask the acquaintances in the queue so as to jump the queue and complete their corresponding service as early as possible. In this paper, we model the queueing phenomenon in the ticket windows at scenic spots as a special queue, namely, the so-called “team queue.” Although this phenomenon often happens in daily life, it is less well known to people. In a team queue, an arriving customer first searches the queue from the top to bottom to see if some of his teammates are already in the queue. If yes, he would join the queue and be served with his teammates; otherwise, he would join the queue at the tail. To this end, arising from the customers’ perspective, the strategic behavior of queueing customers in the ticket windows at scenic spots is analyzed. On the basis of considering the waiting cost and reward, the individual strategies and social optimal strategies of queueing customers are derived, regarding the joining or balking dilemma and for the observable and unobservable cases. Finally, to demonstrate how various parameters affect the joining strategies, some numerical examples are provided.
Highlights
Nowadays, in the ticket windows at scenic spots, stations, and other places, customer service is basically on a firstcome-first-served (FCFS) discipline
The queue-jumping customers can be served before customers who are already in line; as a result, the queueing phenomenon does not adhere to FCFS discipline and the act of jumping in the queue cannot be ignored in designing the service systems
For the sake of analysis, for the queueing service phenomenon in front of some ticket windows at scenic spots, we assume that all queueing customers are queue jumpers; i.e., each arriving customer first finds his friend in the queue so as to cut in the queue and complete his corresponding service as early as possible. erefore, the underlying queueing phenomenon can be modelled as an M/M/1 “team queue (Israeli queue).”
Summary
In the ticket windows at scenic spots, stations, and other places, customer service is basically on a firstcome-first-served (FCFS) discipline. In the existing literature about queue-jumping customers in the ticket windows, many studies mainly focused their analysis on obtaining the stationary distribution as well as key performance measures, such as He and Chavoushi [1], Boxma et al [2], and Perel and Yechiali [3,4,5,6]. As far as we know, there seems to be insufficient research on the phenomenon of queueing service from the perspective of customers, and no research has analyzed the strategic behavior of queue-jumping customers in queueing systems. To this end, we will use the team queue to model the queueing service phenomenon in front of ticket windows at scenic. Afimeimounga et al [23], Chen et al [24], and the references therein are recommended for the interested readers who want to know more about the customer behavior analysis in batch queueing systems
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