Narrow Results

A product form solution for the optimal fractions of divisible load to distribute to processors in a multi-level tree network is described. Here optimality involves parallel processing the load in a minimal amount of time. This tractable solution is similar to the product form solution for equilibrium state probabilities arising in Markovian queueing networks. The existence of this product form solution answers a long standing open question for divisible load scheduling.

In this paper, an overview of different analytic queueing models for traffic on road networks is presented. In the literature, it has been shown that queueing models can be used to adequately model uninterrupted traffic flows. This paper gives a broad review on this literature. Moreover, it is shown that the developed published methodologies (which are mainly single node oriented) can be extended towards queueing networks. First, an extension towards queueing networks with infinite buffer sizes is evaluated. Secondly, the assumption of infinite buffer sizes is dropped leading to queueing networks with finite buffer sizes. The impact of the buffer size when comparing the different queueing network methodologies is studied in detail. The paper ends with an analytical application tool to facilitate the optimal positioning of the counting points on a highway.

Hospital reusable medical equipment (RME) include any items that are intended to be reprocessed and reused indefinitely, including surgical instruments, dental equipment, endoscopes, and others. Such equipment represent a significant portion of a hospital’s inventory costs and recently have generated significant patient cross-contamination concerns due to reprocessing cleaning failures. This chapter discusses recent applications of industrial and systems engineering (ISyE) methods within healthcare organizations to help manage, understand, and improve RME processes, including quality control, reliability, patient safety, facility layout, queueing networks, and inventory management models. Several examples demonstrate the value of these approaches for improved reprocessing management of RME technology.

In order to evaluate the characteristics of a tandem queueing network, we propose a study, taking into account the qualitative properties of distributions. For this, we consider different bounds (lower and upper bounds) for different classes of nonparametric distributions. These bounds are computed while applying the QNA method (Queuing Network Analyser). To verify whether the proposed intervals include(contain) the approximate values, we have considered some approximations as those corresponding to KLB (Kramer Langenbach Benz) and simulation methods. Two algorithms have been constructed for programming the methods, and implemented for under the assumption that the inter-arrival distribution of the network is parametric or nonparametric.