We consider a service system with two Poisson arrival queues. A server chooses which queue to serve at each moment. Once a queue is served, all the customers will be served within a fixed amount of time. This model is useful in studying airport shuttling or certain online computing systems. We propose a simple yet optimal state-independent policy for this problem which is not only easy to implement, but also performs very well.
In this paper, we study an $N$ server fork-join queue with nearly deterministic arrival and service times. Specifically, we present a fluid limit for the maximum queue length as $Ntoinfty$. This fluid limit depends on the initial number of tasks. In order to prove these results, we develop extreme value theory and diffusion approximations for the queue lengths.
We study a token-based central queue with multiple customer types. Customers of each type arrive according to a Poisson process and have an associated set of compatible tokens. Customers may only receive service when they have claimed a compatible token. If upon arrival, more than one compatible token is available, an assignment rule determines which token will be claimed. The service rate obtained by a customer is state-dependent, i.e., it depends on the set of claimed tokens and on the number of customers in the system. Our first main result shows that, provided the assignment rule and the service rates satisfy certain conditions, the steady-state distribution has a product form. We show that our model subsumes known families of models that have product-form steady-state distributions including the order-independent queue of Krzesinski (2011) and the model of Visschers et al. (2012). Our second main contribution involves the derivation of expressions for relevant performance measures such as the sojourn time and the number of customers present in the system. We apply our framework to relevant models, including an M/M/K queue with heterogeneous service rates, the MSCCC queue, multi-server models with redundancy and matching models. For some of these models, we present expressions for performance measures that have not been derived before.
When a major outage occurs on a distribution system due to extreme events, microgrids, distributed generators, and other local resources can be used to restore critical loads and enhance resiliency. This paper proposes a decision-making method to determine the optimal restoration strategy coordinating multiple sources to serve critical loads after blackouts. The critical load restoration problem is solved by a two-stage method with the first stage deciding the post-restoration topology and the second stage determining the set of loads to be restored and the outputs of sources. In the second stage, the problem is formulated as a mixed-integer semidefinite program. The objective is maximizing the number of loads restored, weighted by their priority. The unbalanced three-phase power flow constraint and operational constraints are considered. An iterative algorithm is proposed to deal with integer variables and can attain the global optimum of the critical load restoration problem by solving a few semidefinite programs under two conditions. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by numerical simulation with the modified IEEE 13-node test feeder and the modified IEEE 123-node test feeder under plenty of scenarios. The results indicate that the optimal restoration strategy can be determined efficiently in most scenarios.
We study a problem of scheduling real-time traffic with hard delay constraints in an unreliable wireless channel. Packets arrive at a constant rate to the network and have to be delivered within a fixed number of slots in a fading wireless channel. For an infrastructure mode of traffic with a centralized scheduler, we are interested in the long time average throughput achievable for the real time traffic. In [1], the authors have stud- ied the feasible throughput vectors by identifying the necessary and sufficient conditions using work load characterization. In our work, we provide a characterization of the feasible throughput vectors using the notion of the rate region. We then discuss an extension to the network model studied in [1] by allowing multiple access during contention and propose an enhancement to the rate region of the wireless network. We characterize the feasible throughput vectors with the multiple access technique and study throughput optimal and utility maximizing strategies for the network scenario. Using simulations, we evaluate the performance of the proposed strategy and discuss its advantages.
This study presents an innovative solution for powering electric vehicles, named Charging-as-a-Service (CaaS), that concerns the potential large-scale adoption of light-duty electric vehicles (LDEV) in the Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) industry. Analogous to the MaaS, the core idea of the CaaS is to dispatch service vehicles (SVs) that carry modular battery units (MBUs) to provide LDEVs for mobility service with on-demand battery delivery. The CaaS system is expected to tackle major bottlenecks of a large-scale LDEV adoption in the MaaS industry due to the lack of charging infrastructure and excess waiting and charging time. A hybrid agent-based simulation model (HABM) is developed to model the dynamics of the CaaS system with SV agents, and a trip-based stationary charging probability distribution is introduced to simulate the generation of charging demand for LDEVs. Two dispatching algorithms are further developed to support the optimal operation of the CaaS. The model is validated by assuming electrifying all 13,000 yellow taxis in New York City (NYC) that follow the same daily trip patterns. Multiple scenarios are analyzed under various SV fleet sizes and dispatching strategies. The results suggest that optimal deployment of 250 SVs may serve the LDEV fleet in NYC with an average waiting time of 5 minutes, save the travel distance at over 50 miles per minute, and gain considerable profits of up to $50 per minute. This study offers significant insights into the feasibility, service efficiency, and financial sustainability for deploying city-wide CaaS systems to power the electric MaaS industry.