We establish heavy-traffic stochastic-process limits for the queue-length and overflow stochastic processes in the standard single-server queue with finite waiting room (G/G/1/K). We show that, under regularity conditions, the content and overflow processes in related single-server models with finite waiting room, such as the finite dam, satisfy the same heavy-traffic stochastic-process limits....

Bloat control is an important aspect of evolutionary computation methods, such as genetic programming, which must deal with genomes of arbitrary size. We introduce three new methods for bloat control: Biased Multi-Objective Parsimony Pressure (BMOPP), the Waiting Room, and Death by Size. These methods are unusual approaches to bloat control, and are not only useful in various circumstances, but...

The waiting rooms and areas of general practice (GP) health facilities are places that nearly all of us will find ourselves in but the waiting experience is under-explored. What happens to our sense of self when we move between the outside world where we are citizens and these spaces where we become patients-in-waiting? I begin with what has been written about waiting in general and in health w...

This study examined the relationship between the attractiveness of the physical environment of healthcare facilities and patient perceptions of quality, service, and waiting time through systematic observations and patient satisfaction surveys at 7 outpatient practices at Weill Cornell Medical Center. Findings indicate positive correlations between more attractive environments and higher levels...

We consider a single server system with infinite waiting room in a random environment. The service system and the environment interact in both directions. Whenever the environment enters a specific subset of its state space the service process is completely blocked: Service is interrupted and newly arriving customers are lost. We prove an if-and-only-if-condition for a product form steady state...

Customers move through a series of M service stations. Each customer, independent of all others, requires service from only one of the stations, for a duration of 1 time unit, this being station i with probabilityp1. The customer has zero service at all the other stations, but there is no overtaking between the customers, and so queueing occurs. In the case where there is unlimited waiting room...

A facility with front room and back room operations has the option of hiring specialized or, more expensive, cross-trained workers. Assuming stochastic customer arrival and service times, we seek a smallest-cost combination of cross-trained and specialized workers satisfying constraints on the expected customer waiting time and expected number of workers in the back room. A constraint programmi...