ANALYSIS OF A CONTINUOUS TIME SM[K]/PH[K]/1/FCFS QUEUE: AGE PROCESS, SOJOURN TIMES, AND QUEUE LENGTHS

This paper studies a continuous time queueing system with multiple types of customers and a first-come-first-served service discipline. Customers arrive according to a semi-Markov arrival process and the service times of individual types of customers have PH-distributions. A GI/M/1 type Markov process for a generalized age process of batches of customers is constructed. The stationary distribution of the GI/M/1 type Markov process is found explicitly and, consequently, the distributions of the age of the batch in service, the total workload in the system, waiting times, and sojourn times of different batches and different types of customers are obtained. The paper gives the matrix representations of the PH-distributions of waiting times and sojourn times. Some results are obtained for the distributions of queue lengths at departure epochs and at an arbitrary time. These results can be used to analyze not only the queue length, but also the composition of the queue. Computational methods are developed for calculating steady state distributions related to the queue lengths, sojourn times, and waiting times.