Equilibrium customer strategies in the Geo/Geo/1 queue with single working vacation

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the equilibrium balking strategies of customers in a Geo/Geo/1 queue with single working vacation. Instead of completely stopping service, the server works with a small probability during the working vacation period. As soon as no customers exist in the system, the server takes a single vacation. The customers decide for themselves whether to enter the system or balk based on a natural reward-cost structure, the information available about the status of the server, and the queue length on hand upon arrival. We obtain the equilibrium balking strategies in two cases: fully observable and fully unobservable cases, which depend on whether the customers know both the queue length and the state of the server or none of them. Finally, we present several numerical experiments that demonstrate the effect of some parameters on the equilibrium behavior. © 2014 Fang Wang et al.