We use multidimensional diffusion processes to approximate the dynamics of a
queue served by many parallel servers. The queue is served in the
first-in-first-out (FIFO) order and the customers waiting in queue may abandon
the system without service. Two diffusion models are proposed in this paper.
They differ in how the patience time distribution is built into them. The first
diffusion model uses the patience time density at zero and the second one uses
the entire patience time distribution. To analyze these diffusion models, we
develop a numerical algorithm for computing the stationary distribution of such
a diffusion process. A crucial part of the algorithm is to choose an
appropriate reference density. Using a conjecture on the tail behavior of a
limit queue length process, we propose a systematic approach to constructing a
reference density. With the proposed reference density, the algorithm is shown
to converge quickly in numerical experiments. These experiments also show that
the diffusion models are good approximations for many-server queues, sometimes
for queues with as few as twenty servers