Markovian inventory model with two parallel queues, jockeying and impatient customers

Abstract

This article presents a perishable stochastic inventory system under continuous review at a service facility consisting of two parallel queues with jockeying. Each server has its own queue, and jockeying among the queues is permitted. The capacity of each queue is of finite size L. The inventory is replenished according to an (s; S) inventory policy and the replenishing times are assumed to be exponentially distributed. The individual customer is issued a demanded item after a random service time, which is distributed as negative exponential. The life time of each item is assumed to be exponential. Customers arrive according to a Poisson process and on arrival; they join the shortest feasible queue. Moreover, if the inventory level is more than one and one queue is empty while in the other queue, more than one customer are waiting, then the customer who has to be received after the customer being served in that queue is transferred to the empty queue. This will prevent one server from being idle while the customers are waiting in the other queue. The waiting customer independently reneges the system after an exponentially distributed amount of time. The joint probability distribution of the inventory level, the number of customers in both queues, and the status of the server are obtained in the steady state. Some important system performance measures in the steady state are derived, so as the long-run total expected cost rate.