Overlapping time of a virtual customer in time-varying many-server queues

Motivated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, this paper investigates customers’ infection risk by evaluating the overlapping time of a virtual customer with others in queueing systems. Most of the current methodologies focus on characterizing the risk in stationary systems, which may not apply to the more practical time-varying systems. As such, we propose an approximation framework that relies on the fluid limit to compute the expected overlapping time in time-varying queueing systems. Simulation experiments verify the accuracy of our approach.