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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2016
Customers enter a pool according to a Poisson process and wait there to be found and processed by a single server. The service times of successive items are independent and have a common general distribution. Successive services are separated by seek phases during which the server searches for the next customer. The search process is Markovian and the probability of locating a customer in (t, t + dt) is proportional to the number of customers in the pool at time t. Various stationary probability distributions for this model are obtained in explicit forms well-suited for numerical computation.
Under the assumption of exponential service times, corresponding results are obtained for the case where customers may escape from the pool.
Research supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. ENG-7908351 and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Grant No. AFOSR-77-3236.
Support from the Fulbright travelling scholarship is acknowledged.