TITLE:  Dynamic Queueing Transience

ABSTRACT:

Inspired by communication and healthcare services, this talk summarizes the methods developed with many collaborators over the decades to understand the transient behavior of dynamic rate queues. This analysis is needed when confronted with the dynamic parameters found in time-inhomogeneous Markovian queueing models. The static equilibrium analysis for the steady state of constant rate queues no longer applies.

Constant parameters summarizing the transient behavior for these steady state systems are now replaced by deterministic dynamical systems. We can then approximate the optimal behavior of these queues by controlling the corresponding family of ordinary differential equations.

Bio:

William A. Massey is the Edwin S. Wilsey Professor in the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering at Princeton University. He is both an inaugural fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and a fellow of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). His research interests include dynamic rate queues, queueing networks, stochastic analysis, dynamical systems control, and their applications to communications and healthcare management.  He received his A.B. degree in mathematics from Princeton University in 1977 (Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, and Sigma Xi) and his Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University in 1981. The latter was funded by the Bell Laboratories Cooperative Research Fellowship for Minorities. He worked at Bell Laboratories as a member of technical staff in their Mathematical Sciences Research Center for 20 years until joining the Princeton University faculty in 2001.