People’s Software Company has just set up a call center to provide technical assistance on its new software package. Two technical representatives are taking the calls, where the time required by either representative to answer a customer’s questions has an exponential distribution with a mean of 8 minutes. Calls are arriving according to a Poisson process at a mean rate of 10 per hour.
By next year, the mean arrival rate of calls is expected to decline to 5 per hour, so the plan is to reduce the number of technical representatives to one then.
T (a) Assuming that μ will continue to be 7.5 calls per hour for next year’s queueing system, determine L, Lq, W, and Wq for both the current system and next year’s system. For each of these four measures of performance, which system yields the smaller value?
(b) Now assume that μ will be adjustable when the number of technical representatives is reduced to one. Solve algebraically for the value of μ that would yield the same value of W as for the current system.
(c) Repeat part (b) with Wq instead of W.