Modeling Customer Reactions to Congestion in Competitive Service Facilities
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Abstract
This paper reviews classic approaches for modeling customers’ choice behavior in competitive facility planning problems. They are either deterministic or probabilistic and work by a utility function based on some factors whether customer-independent or dependent. This paper focuses especially on congestion, the most important factor in customer to service or fixed-server systems. Various behaviors which customers may divulge when they face with a congested facility are extensively studied. We also define a new congestion-sensitivity reaction which has not been considered in the literature. Relevant modeling approaches are proposed to formulate customers-sensitivity to congestion. An illustrative example is also given to analyze and compare the proposed approaches.
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