When waiting times cannot be observed directly, Little’s law can be applied to estimate the average waiting time by the average number in system divided by the average arrival rate, but that simple indirect estimator tends to be biased significantly when the arrival rates are timevarying and the service times are relatively long. Here it is shown that the bias in that indirect estimator can be ...

This paper analyzes the diffusion limit of a discrete time queueing system with constant service rate and connections that randomly enter and depart the system. Each connection generates periodic traffic while it is active, and a connection’s lifetime has finite mean. This can model a TDMA system with constant bit rate connections. The diffusion scaling retains the semiperiodic behavior, allowi...

Consider a multiclass stochastic network with state dependent service rates and arrival rates describing bandwidth-sharing mechanisms as well as admission control and/or load balancing schemes. Given Poisson arrival and exponential service requirements, the number of customers in the network evolves as a multi-dimensional birth-and-death process on a finite subset of N. We assume that the death...

In many service industries, the firm adjusts the product price dynamically by taking into account the current product inventory and the future demand distribution. Because the firm can easily monitor the product inventory, the success of dynamic pricing relies on an accurate demand forecast. In this paper, we consider a situation where the firm does not have an accurate demand forecast, but can...

Armony et al. (2015) carried out an extensive exploratory data analysis of the patient flow through the Rambam Hospital in Israel from a queueing science perspective. In addition, they made a large portion of the data publicly available. We respond by using a portion of that data to analyze the Emergency Department (ED). Our analysis confirms the previous conclusions about the time-varying arri...

We consider optimal scheduling of the server in a finite-population queueing system with multiple classes of customers, when preemption is allowed. A customer of class i has arrival rate i , service rate i , and holding cost ci per unit time. We derive conditions under which the c rule is optimal. © 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.