Time-dependent performance evaluation of tire repair emergency systems in the agricultural stage of sugarcane mills

Abstract

• SBC approach for the hypercube queuing model is developed. • Time-dependent arrival rates in regions of tire repair emergency systems. • Analytical solution to analyze time-dependent spatially distributed queues. • A sensitivity analysis is conducted in the agricultural stage of sugarcane mills. • The proposed approach is capable of analyzing emergency service systems. This study presents a stationary backlog-carryover (SBC) approach to deal with hypercube queuing models with time-dependent user arrival rates for the analysis of emergency agricultural systems. It is motivated by practical situations faced by the agricultural stage of sugarcane mills. Due to the frequent changes in the locations of harvest fronts, the emergency calls for tire repair also change their locations over time, and managers should determine the appropriate number and locations of servers and their dispatch policies. This approach is applied to a case study conducted in the tire repair emergency services of a sugarcane mill. A simulation model is also developed to crosscheck the validity of this approach. This work aims at analyzing and highlighting the importance of considering time-dependent changes in arrival rates at different regions of the system. The findings suggest that this approach is flexible enough to deal with alternative dispatch policies, changes in the number of servers, and the increase in server utilization rates.