Statistics Seminar（2013-09）

Topic:Queues in Service Systems: Customer Abandonment and Diffusion Approximations

Speaker:Jim Dai , Cornell University and Tsinghua University

Time:Friday, 7 June, 14:30-16:00

Location:Room 216, Guanghua Building 2

Organizer:Department of Business Statistics and Econometrics &Department of Mnagement Science and Information Systems

Abstract：Parallel-server queues with customer abandonment serve as a building block to model service systems. Such a queue is able to be operated in the quality- and efficiency-driven (QED) regime to achieve both quality of service and high server utilization. We survey recent results for these queues. They include insensitivity of patience timedistribution, data-driven modeling of customer abandonment, diffusion models as a practical tool for performance analysis.

This talk is based on joint work with Shuangchi He at the National University of Singapore.

About the speaker：Jim Dai is a professor in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering (ORIE) of Cornell University. He is currently on leave from his Edenfield Professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology, where he has been a faculty member for 22 years. He is a Special Term Professor at Tsinghua University and a Visiting Professor in Decision Sciences at National University of Singapore. For more than twenty years, he has worked on stochastic models arising from communications, manufacturing, and service systems that include data switches, semiconductor wafer fabrication lines, call centers, and healthcare-delivery systems.

Jim Dai received B.A. and M.S. degrees from Nanjing University and a Ph.D. degree from Stanford University, all in mathematics. He is an elected fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics and an elected fellow of Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). His awards for research contributions include the Best Publication Award in 1997 and The Erlang Prize in 1998, both from the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS. He delivered the Markov Lecture at INFORMS national meeting in October 2012. He is currently an Area Editor and the Interim Editor-in-Chief for Mathematics of Operations Research, a past Area Editor for Operations Research, and a past Series Editor for Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science. He was recently appointed by INFORMS to be the next Editor-in-Chief for Mathematics of Operations Research effective January 1, 2013.