| Abstract: | We consider the control policy of an M/G/1 queueing system with a startup and unreliable server, in which the length of the vacation period is controlled either by the number of arrivals during the idle period, or by a timer. After all the customers have been served in the queue, the server immediately takes a vacation and operates an NT vacation policy: the server reactivates as soon as the number of arrivals in the queue reaches a predetermined threshold N or when the waiting time of the leading customer reaches T units. In such a variant vacation system, the steady-state probabilities cannot be obtained explicitly. Thus, the maximum entropy principle is used to derive the approximate formulas for the steady-state probability distributions of the queue length. A comparitive analysis of two approximation approaches, using the first and the second moments of system size, is studied. Both solutions are compared with the exact results under several service time distributions with specific parameter values. Our numerical investigations demonstrate that the use of the second moment of system size for the available information is, in general, sufficient to obtain more accurate estimations than that of the first moment. |
