A Markovian single server with upstream job and downstream demand arrival stream

In this paper we consider a Markovian single server system which processes items arriving from an upstream region (as usual in queueing systems) and is controlled by a demand arrival stream for finished items from a downstream area. A finite storage is available at the server to store finished items not immediately needed in the downstream area. The system considered corresponds to an assembly-like queue with two input streams. The system is stable in a strict sense only if all queues are finite, i.e., both random processes are synchronized via blocking. This notion leads to a complementary system with a very similar state space which is a pair of Markovian single servers with synchronous arrivals. In the mathematical analysis the main focus is on the state probabilities and expectation of minimum and maximum of the two input queues. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.