A set of agents with possibly different waiting costs have to receive the same service one after theother. Efficiency requires to maximize total welfare. Equity requires to at least treat equal agentsequally. One must form a queue, set up monetary transfers to compensate agents having to...

In this paper, we present a bounding methodology that allows to compute a tight lower boundon the cycle time of fork--join queueing networks with blocking and with general service timedistributions. The methodology relies on two ideas. First, probability masses fitting (PMF)discretizes the...

We study a supply chain consisting of production-inventory systems at several locations which are coupled by a common supplier. Demand of customers arrives at each production system according to a Poisson process and is lost if the local inventory is depleted ("lost sales"). To satisfy a...

We study a production-inventory system with two customer classes with different priorities which are admitted to the system following a flexible admission control scheme. The inventory management is according to a base stock policy and arriving demand which finds the inventory depleted is lost...

In recent years, the performance-based approach to contracting for medical services has been gaining popu-larity across different healthcare delivery systems, both in the US (under the name of "Pay-for-Performance",or P4P), and abroad ("Payment-by-Results", or PbR, in the UK). One common element...

Techniques for performance estimation in parallel database systems are well established for parameters such as throughput, bottlenecks and resource utilisation. However, response time estimation is a complex activity which is difficult to predict and has attracted research for a number of years....