872 research outputs found

    An analytical comparison of the patient-to-doctor policy and the doctor-to-patient policy in the outpatient clinic

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    Outpatient clinics traditionally organize processes such that the doctor remains in a consultation room, while patients visit for consultation, we call this the Patient-to-Doctor policy. A different approach is the Doctor-to-Patient policy, whereby the doctor travels between multiple consultation rooms, in which patients prepare for their consultation. In the latter approach, the doctor saves time by consulting fully prepared patients. We compare the two policies via a queueing theoretic and a discrete-event simulation approach. We analytically show that the Doctor-to-Patient policy is superior to the Patient-to-Doctor policy under the condition that the doctor’s travel time between rooms is lower than the patient’s preparation time. Simulation results indicate that the same applies when the average travel time is lower than the average preparation time. In addition, to calculate the required number of consultation rooms in the Doctor-to-Patient policy, we provide an expression for the fraction of consultations that are in immediate succession; or, in other words, the fraction of time the next patient is prepared and ready, immediately after a doctor finishes a consultation.We apply our methods for a range of distributions and parameters and to a case study in a medium-sized general hospital that inspired this research

    A Case Study on Grid Performance Modeling

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    The purpose of this case study is to develop a performance model for an enterprise grid for performance management and capacity planning1. The target environment includes grid applications such as health-care and financial services where the data is located primarily within the resources of a worldwide corporation. The approach is to build a discrete event simulation model for a representative work-flow grid. Five work-flow classes, found using a customized k-means clustering algorithm characterize the workload of the grid. Analyzing the gap between the simulation and measurement data validates the model. The case study demonstrates that the simulation model can be used to predict the grid system performance given a workload forecast. The model is also used to evaluate alternative scheduling strategies. The simulation model is flexible and easily incorporates several system details

    Pricing Link by Time

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    The combination of loss-based TCP and drop-tail routers often results in full buffers, creating large queueing delays. The challenge with parameter tuning and the drastic consequence of improper tuning have discouraged network administrators from enabling AQM even when routers support it. To address this problem, we propose a novel design principle for AQM, called the pricing-link-by-time (PLT) principle. PLT increases the link price as the backlog stays above a threshold β, and resets the price once the backlog goes below β. We prove that such a system exhibits cyclic behavior that is robust against changes in network environment and protocol parameters. While β approximately controls the level of backlog, the backlog dynamics are invariant for β across a wide range of values. Therefore, β can be chosen to reduce delay without undermining system performance. We validate these analytical results using packet-level simulation

    A study of topologies and protocols for fiber optic local area network

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    The emergence of new applications requiring high data traffic necessitates the development of high speed local area networks. Optical fiber is selected as the transmission medium due to its inherent advantages over other possible media and the dual optical bus architecture is shown to be the most suitable topology. Asynchronous access protocols, including token, random, hybrid random/token, and virtual token schemes, are developed and analyzed. Exact expressions for insertion delay and utilization at light and heavy load are derived, and intermediate load behavior is investigated by simulation. A new tokenless adaptive scheme whose control depends only on the detection of activity on the channel is shown to outperform round-robin schemes under uneven loads and multipacket traffic and to perform optimally at light load. An approximate solution to the queueing delay for an oscillating polling scheme under chaining is obtained and results are compared with simulation. Solutions to the problem of building systems with a large number of stations are presented, including maximization of the number of optical couplers, and the use of passive star/bus topologies, bridges and gateways

    Quantifying Information Overload in Social Media and its Impact on Social Contagions

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    Information overload has become an ubiquitous problem in modern society. Social media users and microbloggers receive an endless flow of information, often at a rate far higher than their cognitive abilities to process the information. In this paper, we conduct a large scale quantitative study of information overload and evaluate its impact on information dissemination in the Twitter social media site. We model social media users as information processing systems that queue incoming information according to some policies, process information from the queue at some unknown rates and decide to forward some of the incoming information to other users. We show how timestamped data about tweets received and forwarded by users can be used to uncover key properties of their queueing policies and estimate their information processing rates and limits. Such an understanding of users' information processing behaviors allows us to infer whether and to what extent users suffer from information overload. Our analysis provides empirical evidence of information processing limits for social media users and the prevalence of information overloading. The most active and popular social media users are often the ones that are overloaded. Moreover, we find that the rate at which users receive information impacts their processing behavior, including how they prioritize information from different sources, how much information they process, and how quickly they process information. Finally, the susceptibility of a social media user to social contagions depends crucially on the rate at which she receives information. An exposure to a piece of information, be it an idea, a convention or a product, is much less effective for users that receive information at higher rates, meaning they need more exposures to adopt a particular contagion.Comment: To appear at ICSWM '1

    A model checker for performance and dependability properties

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    Markov chains are widely used in the context of performance and reliability evaluation of systems of various nature. Model checking of such chains with respect to a given (branching) temporal logic formula has been proposed for both the discrete [8] and the continuous time setting [1], [3]. In this short paper, we describe the prototype model checker EMC2E \vdash M C^2 for discrete and continuous-time Markov chains, where properties are expressed in appropriate extensions of CTL.We illustrate the general benefits of this approach and discuss the structure of the tool

    Parallel discrete event simulation: A shared memory approach

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    With traditional event list techniques, evaluating a detailed discrete event simulation model can often require hours or even days of computation time. Parallel simulation mimics the interacting servers and queues of a real system by assigning each simulated entity to a processor. By eliminating the event list and maintaining only sufficient synchronization to insure causality, parallel simulation can potentially provide speedups that are linear in the number of processors. A set of shared memory experiments is presented using the Chandy-Misra distributed simulation algorithm to simulate networks of queues. Parameters include queueing network topology and routing probabilities, number of processors, and assignment of network nodes to processors. These experiments show that Chandy-Misra distributed simulation is a questionable alternative to sequential simulation of most queueing network models

    Compact Jacobi matrices: from Stieltjes to Krein and M(a,b)

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    In a note at the end of his paper {\it Recherches sur les fractions continues}, Stieltjes gave a necessary and sufficient condition when a continued fraction is represented by a meromorphic function. This result is related to the study of compact Jacobi matrices. We indicate how this notion was developped and used since Stieltjes, with special attention to the results by M. G. Krein. We also pay attention to the perturbation of a constant Jacobi matrix by a compact Jacobi matrix, work which basically started with Blumenthal in 1889 and which now is known as the theory for the class M(a,b)M(a,b)
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