Equilibrium strategic behavior of customers in the M/M/1 queue with partial failures and repairs

This paper analyzes the customers’ equilibrium strategic behavior in the M/M/1 queue subject to Poisson generated partial failures and repairs. In such a queueing system, whenever a partial failure occurs, the system does not admit any customer and continues the service at a lower rate instead of stopping working completely. This goes on till the system becomes empty and, at that point, an exponential repair time is sent on. The arriving customer’s dilemma is whether to enter or balk based on a linear reward-cost structure. We discuss the fully observable and fully unobservable queues respectively. For each type of queue, the corresponding equilibrium balking strategies of customers and the expected social benefits per time unit are derived. Finally, we illustrate the theoretical results by presenting some numerical examples.