Optimizing contracted resource capacity with two advance cancelation modes

Critical resources are often shared among different classes of customers. Capacity reservation allows each class of customers to better manage priorities of its customers but might lead to unused capacity. Unused capacity can be avoided or reduced by advance cancelation. This paper addresses the service capacity reservation for a given class of customers. The reservation process is characterized by: contracted time slots (CTS) reserved for the class of customers, requests for lengthy regular time slots (RTS) and two advance cancelation modes to cancel CTS one-period or two-period before. The optimal control under a given contract is formulated as an average cost Markov Decision Process (MDP) in order to minimize customer waiting times, unused CTS and CTS cancelation. Structural properties of optimal control policies are established via the corresponding discounted cost MDP problem. Numerical results show that two-period advance CTS cancelation can significantly improve the contract-based solution.

► This paper addresses reservation and advance cancelation of service capacity. ► The problem is formulated as an average cost Markov Decision Process. ► Structural properties are established by means of supermodularity and superconvexity. ► Numerical results show significant benefit of advance cancelation.