Each week, we publish layman’s abstracts of new articles from our prestigious portfolio of journals in statistics. The aim is to highlight the latest research to a broader audience in an accessible format.The article featured today is from Applied Stochastic Models in Business and Industry with the full article now available to read here.
, , . A cyclic non-homogeneous Markov chain model for resource availability optimization in a two-parking lots system with priority classes and resource reservation. Appl Stochastic Models Bus Ind. 2022; 38( 1): 182– 210. doi:10.1002/asmb.2655
Parking lot availability has been extensively studied during the last decades since there is a tremendous increase of vehicle usage. To enrich the research work in this area, an integrated theoretical framework for modelling parking space availability through resource reservation in a two-parking lot problem which can be accessed by clients of different priorities is studied. Clients of a parking lot consisting of two-parking areas are partitioned into priority classes according to their needs and the ticket paid to enter the parking areas, and the aim is to determine the optimal number of parking spaces that should be reserved for clients of higher priority. The optimal policy provides the number of reserved parking spaces for both parking areas that simultaneously minimize the probability of DoS due to the lack of parking spaces. To capture the periodic behavior of the arrival and the departure processes, an appropriate periodic time–dependent stochastic process is used to model the evolution of the free parking spaces. Beyond determining the optimal reservation policy, two performance measures are also considered, reflecting the total expected walking time from the parking lot to a point of interest (i.e. airport terminal) and parking lot administrative company’s total expected hourly profit.