Using a birth‐and‐death process to estimate the steady‐state distribution of a periodic queue

James Dong and Ward Whitt

Naval Research Logistics (NRL), 2015, vol. 62, issue 8, 664-685

Abstract: If the number of customers in a queueing system as a function of time has a proper limiting steady‐state distribution, then that steady‐state distribution can be estimated from system data by fitting a general stationary birth‐and‐death (BD) process model to the data and solving for its steady‐state distribution using the familiar local‐balance steady‐state equation for BD processes, even if the actual process is not a BD process. We show that this indirect way to estimate the steady‐state distribution can be effective for periodic queues, because the fitted birth and death rates often have special structure allowing them to be estimated efficiently by fitting parametric functions with only a few parameters, for example, 2. We focus on the multiserver Mt/GI/s queue with a nonhomogeneous Poisson arrival process having a periodic time‐varying rate function. We establish properties of its steady‐state distribution and fitted BD rates. We also show that the fitted BD rates can be a useful diagnostic tool to see if an Mt/GI/s model is appropriate for a complex queueing system. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics 62: 664–685, 2015

Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/nav.21672

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:wly:navres:v:62:y:2015:i:8:p:664-685

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Naval Research Logistics (NRL) from John Wiley & Sons
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().