Applications of fluid models in service operations management

Noa Zychlinski ()
Additional contact information
Noa Zychlinski: Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications, 2023, vol. 103, issue 1, No 5, 185 pages

Abstract: Abstract The service sector is an indisputable and fundamental pillar of today’s business world, encompassing nearly 80 percent of the workforce in the USA. Service operations management has been a fertile research area addressing strategic, tactical and operational challenges related to service systems. Such problems usually have a complex, dynamic stochastic nature, often leading to models that are both analytically and computationally complicated. In such cases, fluid deterministic models that approximate the dynamics of stochastic/queueing systems can yield accurate and tractable optimization formulations. These formulations enable the construction of intuitive, insightful policies that are implementable in practice, even in time-varying systems. This paper focuses on the applicative aspects of fluid models in addressing various problems in service and healthcare operations management. We review the literature on fluid model applications, discuss the situations in which fluid models are less adequate as well as the implementation of a fluid-based policy into a stochastic discrete system. Lastly, we identify future research opportunities and challenges that have yet to be addressed.

Keywords: Queueing systems; Service/healthcare operations management; Assymptotic analysis; Functional strong law of large numbers; 90B22; 60K30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11134-022-09868-2 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:queues:v:103:y:2023:i:1:d:10.1007_s11134-022-09868-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11134/

DOI: 10.1007/s11134-022-09868-2

Access Statistics for this article

Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications is currently edited by Sergey Foss

More articles in Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().