The shuttle dispatch problem with compound Poisson arrivals: Controls at two terminals

We consider the control of an infinite capacity shuttle which transports passengers between two terminals. The passengers arrive at each terminal according to a compound Poisson process and the travel time from one terminal to the other is a random variable following an arbitrary distribution. The following control limit policy is considered: dispatch the shuttle at terminali, at the instant that the total number of passengers waiting at terminali reaches or exceeds a predetermined control limitm _i . The objective of this paper is to obtain the mean waiting time of an arbitrary passenger at each terminal for given control valuesm ₁ andm ₂. We also discuss a search procedure to obtain the optimal control values which minimize the total expected cost per unit time under a linear cost structure.