This paper presents an on-orbit servicing model for geostationary satellites that uses a priority queue to manage service traffic. Drawing from a consumer pricing model for queues in the economics literature, each satellite has a unique cost of waiting determined by, among other things, customer class (government or commercial), fuel level, repair urgency, and business need. This cost of waiting drives each customer satellite to prefer a particular level of priority in the queue and leads the service planner to offer different priority levels of service. Incentive-compatible prices are derived, which leads customers to make utility-maximizing decisions on the appropriate priority level. Under this pricing model, revenue generated by the planner will be higher with a priority scheme than with a first-in-first-out (FIFO) queue. A case study is presented comparing FIFO with 2, 3, 4, and 5-priority level schemes at different failure rates.
Cunningham et al. (Tue,) studied this question.