Article ID: | iaor20127766 |
Volume: | 40 |
Issue: | 6 |
Start Page Number: | 573 |
End Page Number: | 577 |
Publication Date: | Nov 2012 |
Journal: | Operations Research Letters |
Authors: | Zhang Bo, Zwart Bert |
Keywords: | markov processes, simulation |
Motivated by service systems with time‐varying customer arrivals, we consider a fluid model as a macroscopic approximation for many‐server Markovian queues alternating between underloaded and overloaded intervals. Our main result is a refinement of the piecewise stationary approximation (PSA) for the stationary distribution of the fluid model. The form of the refined approximation suggests simple metrics for assessing the accuracy of PSA for underloaded and overloaded intervals respectively.