Technical Note—Approximating Systems Fed by Poisson Processes with Rapidly Changing Arrival Rates

Abstract

In many operations management settings, the arrival process to the system exhibits clear nonstationarities. These nonstationarities may arise as a consequence of time-of-day effects, day-of-week effects, seasonalities, or stochastic fluctuations in the arrival rate. Tools that are developed for performance prediction and decision making when systems are stationary may not be valid in the nonstationary environment. This paper provides a generic, closed-form, and simple approximation tool for when the nonstationarities are caused by rapid fluctuations in the arrival processes.