Wait-Time Predictors for Customer Service Systems with Time-Varying Demand and Capacity

We develop new, improved real-time delay predictors for many-server service systems with a time-varying arrival rate, a time-varying number of servers, and customer abandonment. We develop four new predictors, two of which exploit an established deterministic fluid approximation for a many-server queueing model with those features. These delay predictors can be used to make delay announcements. We use computer simulation to show that the proposed predictors outperform previous predictors.