Prioritization in the Presence of Self-ordering Opportunities in Omnichannel Services
研究了快餐店等场景中，顾客通过手机自助下单（移动端）与到店顾客（步行）两类人群的排队优先级问题，分析了不同优先级策略对平均等待时间、系统吞吐量和社会福利的影响，发现传统服务向全渠道转型可能降低吞吐量，优先级策略的选择至关重要。
Motivated by the popularity of mobile-order-and-pay applications, especially in fast-casual food restaurants and coffee shops, we study omnichannel service systems—where customers can employ mobile applications for self-ordering—with respect to sojourn times, throughput, and social welfare. Our models are two-stage queues with two customer classes: Walk-ins and mobiles. We identify Pareto efficient prioritization policies, highlighting trade-offs between each class’s mean sojourn times. We allow customers to make strategic joining decisions based on their anticipated delays under an information structure where walk-ins observe partial queue length information. We draw from a wide array of techniques, including steady-state, transient, busy period, hitting-time analyses, and matrix analytic methods. We showcase the significance of prioritization on the system throughput and social welfare. We demonstrate settings where a traditional service system’s (typically beneficial) transformation to an omnichannel reduces throughput. Our analysis highlights the importance of prioritization policy choice for an efficient transition to an omnichannel service system. The throughput-optimal policy choice highly depends on the operational parameters and customer patience levels; implementing a wrong policy can yield a significant loss in throughput and profitability.