Equivalence of Fluid Models for Gt/GI/N +GI Queues

Four different fluid model formulations have been recently developed for Gt/GI/N+ GI queues, including a two-parameter fluid model in Whitt (2006) by tracking elapsed service and patience times of each customer, a measure-valued fluid model in Kang and Ramanan (2010) and its extension in Zuñiga (2014) by tracking elapsed service and patience times of each customer, and a measure-valued fluid model in Zhang (2013) by tracking residual service and patience times of each customer. We show that the two fluid models tracking elapsed times (Whitt’s and Kang and Ramanan’s fluid models) are equivalent formulations for the same Gt/GI/N +GI queue, whereas Zuñiga’s fluid model and Zhang’s fluid model are not entirely equivalent under general initial conditions. We then identify necessary and sufficient conditions under which Zuñiga’s fluid model and Zhang’s fluid model can be derived from each other for the same system, in which certain measure-valued fluid processes tracking residual service and patience times of each customer derived from Kang-Ramanan and Zuñiga’s fluid models play an important role. The equivalence properties discovered provide important implications for the understanding of the recent development for non-Markovian many-server queues.