Arrival Data Modeling
Operational decision making in service systems often depends largely on the characterization of the random fluctuations involved. Exogenous arrivals represent a primary source of uncertainty and their stochastic behavior needs to be modeled carefully. Recent empirical studies demonstrate that the arrival data usually exhibits a dynamics that is substantially more sophisticated than the Poisson process model (and even the renewal process model), both of which are the underlying assumption of a wide variety of results in the queueing theory.