Henk Tijms. Queues with Impatient Customers

Abstract. A queueing system often encountered in practice is one in which customers wait for service for a limited time and leave the system if service has not begun within that time. In such systems the customer has typically no information about the remaining waiting time until a server is available. Practical examples include queueing systems in telecommunication and inventory systems with perishable goods. We consider models in which the impatience time is deterministic  and the arrival process of customers is a Poisson process. For several models we will show that for  the loss probability  of a customer  an appealing and intuitive expression can be given that involves  the waiting-time distribution of a customer in the corresponding model with no impatience.