Customer service has assumed strategic importance in most manufacturing environments. Corporate reputations often depend on how reliably promised lead times are met. A goal of filling orders within a service window of T time units is often encountered in practice. This goal ignores the...

For given external arrival process and given service-time distributions, the object is to determine the order of infinite-capacity single-server queues in series that minimizes the long-run average sojourn time per customer. We gain additional insight into this queueing design problem, and...

We study single-server stations in tandem, in which customers arrive according to a Poisson Process and are to be served at each of two servers. The order of the stations is assumed not to affect the quality of the service customers obtain. Using a light traffic approximation, we select (for...

An important design problem for queueing systems is to determine the best order for two or more service stations in series. For given external arrival process and given service-time distributions, the object is to determine the order of the stations (to be used by all customers) that minimizes...