A queueing system with impatient customers

Abstract A queueing situation often encountered in practice is that in which customers wait for service for a limited time only and leave the system if not served during that time. This paper considers a single-server queueing system with Poisson input and general service times, where a customer becomes a lost customer when his service has not begun within a fixed time after his arrival. For performance measures like the fraction of customers who are lost and the average delay in queue of a customer we obtain exact and approximate results that are useful for practical applications.