An inventory-queue is an inventory system controlled by a processing station with queueing. They are natural building blocks for supply chain models. An important and largely open issue for inventory queues is the characterization of their departure processes. In an inventory-queue, departures are triggered either by a job arrival when the output buffer is not empty or otherwise by a service completion. Such departures are more difficult to analyze than departures from a standard queue. The main results in this study are expressions for the probability distributions and squared coefficients of variation of inter-departure times for base-stock inventory-queues with birth-death production processes.

(Joint work with Liwei Bai (Georgia Tech), Liming Liu and Weixin Shang (Hong Kong Univ. of Sci. and Tech.)). Based on the paper, L. Bai, B. Fralix, L. Liu, and W. Shang. Inter-Departure Times in Base-Stock Inventory-Queues. Queueing Systems 47 (2004) 345-361.