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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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This thesis consists of two parts. The first part is a study of a stochastic fork-join processing network in which each job upon arrival splits into m tasks, which are simultaneously assigned to m processing stations. When all of its m tasks are finished, the job is completed and exits the system. Such fork-join processing is common in computer/telecommunication systems, manufacturing, and supply chains. The main concerns are the time to complete a job (the response time), and the queue lengths at the stations, when the network is in equilibrium. We solve the thirty-year old problem of obtaining closed-form approximations for the probability distributions of response times and queues in fork-join networks. Statistical tests, based on simulations of the network, justify that our distributions are precise approximations of the actual distributions. We consider several types of fork-join networks including an assembly/inventory system and a multi-stage fork-join system.
The second part of this thesis is a study of a
