Service capacity pooling in M/G/1 service systems

Abstract

We study the cost-sharing problem among independent service providers in a service capacity pooling system. The effective improvement of such pooling system can be achieved by reducing the resource idleness in case of congestion. In this paper, we model both the service provider and the cooperative coalition as a single server queue. We attempt to answer the following questions: (i) which coalition strategy should be used; and (ii) which allocation rule should be selected in order to maintain the stability of the coalition? In particular, we consider the service pooling with a fixed service capacity for M/G/1 service systems. The benefit of the pooling system is due to the shortened waiting queue in the overall system. We develop the corresponding cooperative game with transferable utility, and analyze the core allocations. Although it is difficult to express a core allocation explicitly for the game, we prove the non-emptiness of the core. We give a reasonable expression of Equal Profit Method to distribute the cost for our game, and investigate a number of cost allocation rules under three typical situations to evaluate the gain of the service pooling strategy for each service provider. The numerical results show that the cost allocation rule proposed gives a reasonable cost-sharing result considering the contribution of each participant.