Location-based queuing

A computer program product comprising a computer readable medium encoding instructions which when executed in a computing system are effective to cause said computing system to perform a method of queuing to a plurality of mobile agents, by:

• (a) receiving information regarding the location of one of said mobile agents and assigning said mobile agent to one of a plurality of location zones based on said received information;
• (b) maintaining a plurality of location-specific queues of requests, each location-specific queue having one or more of said location zones associated therewith, and each location-specific queue being serviced only by those mobile agents whose assigned location zone matches a location zone of that location-specific queue;
• (c) receiving a request for the services of a mobile agent, said request being associated with a request location;
• (d) determining an optimum queue for said request from among said plurality of location-specific queues based at least in part on a comparison between said request location and a location zone associated with said optimum queue, subject to a servicing constraint that a queue can only be selected as said optimum queue if at least one agent is currently servicing said queue.

A queuing system for queuing to a plurality of mobile agents, comprising:

• (a) a mobile agent resource record which records an assignment of one of a plurality of location zones to one of said mobile agents based on information received regarding the location of said mobile agent;
• (b) a plurality of location-specific queues of requests, each location-specific queue having one or more of said location zones associated therewith, and each location-specific queue being serviced only by those mobile agents whose assigned location zone matches a location zone of that location-specific queue;
• (c) a request record which records a received request for the services of a mobile agent, together with a request location associated with said request;
• (d) a queue allocation system which is configured to determine an optimum queue for said request from among said plurality of location-specific queues based at least in part on a comparison between said request location and a location zone associated with said optimum queue, subject to a servicing constraint that a queue can only be selected as said optimum queue if at least one agent is currently servicing said queue.