Inter-departure times in base-stock inventory-queues

Liwei BAI, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Brian FRALIX, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA
Liming LIU, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology
Weixin SHANG, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Copyright © 2004 Springer US.

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Abstract

An inventory-queue is an inventory system controlled by a processing station with queueing. They are natural building blocks for supply chain models. An important and largely open issue for inventory queues is the characterization of their departure processes. In an inventory-queue, departures are triggered either by a job arrival when the output buffer is not empty or otherwise by a service completion. Such departures are more difficult to analyze than departures from a standard queue. The main results in this study are expressions for the probability distributions and squared coefficient of variations of inter-departure times for base-stock inventory-queues with birth–death production processes.