New Queueing Network Approximations for Vaccination Clinics - Studying the Batch Arrival, Batch Service Processes and Stations with no Real Servers

The threat of an outbreak of contagious disease in the United States, caused by a terrorist act or a natural occurrence, has prompted public health departments to update and enhance their plans for responding to such events. Although different responses are available, setting up the mass dispensing and vaccination clinics which can treat so many county residents in a short period should be an effect policy. Due to the nature of these facilities, we model a clinic as an open queueing network and estimate the time that county residents will spend at each workstation for such facilities. Estimating cycle time is necessary to determine how much space to allow in the clinic for queues, since reducing queueing is important to avoid increasing crowding, and confusing. In this book, we intuitively and experimentally develop analytical models for queueing networks that have batch arrivals, batch size variability, batch service processes and self service stations. A significant contribution of this book is the synthesis of a variety of existing and new proposed models into a systematic approach for any queueing network explained in this work. Although this work has specific applications in emergency planning area and is absolutely recommended to the public health planners, it can be useful for professionals in communication and manufacturing area who study the behavior of queueing systems such as G / G / ?, G [x]/ G / c, and G / G [x] / C

is a PHD student in operation management atRobert Smith school of Business, University ofMaryland. He received a M.S. in systemengineering in 2007 from Institute for SystemsResearch at the University of Maryland, CollegePark. He also obtained a B.S. in Industrialengineering in 2005 from Sharif Univeristy ofTechnology, Tehran.