Using a birth‐and‐death process to estimate the steady‐state distribution of a periodic queue
提出一种间接方法：通过拟合一般平稳生灭过程模型来估计周期排队系统的稳态分布，重点分析了多服务台Mt/GI/s队列，并证明拟合的生灭速率可作为诊断工具。
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