# $M/M/1$ Running job distribution

Consider an $M/M/1$ queue with $\mu=1$. Suppose that a job comes in and see only one job is running in the server. I want to know the distribution of duration of the running job . Simulation shows that it is not exponential but more like Erlang. I think this is because small jobs will not remain in the server so long that another job have chance to see that on arrival.

My final goal is to find out the distribution of sum of duration of jobs that a jobs sees on arrival in general case when there are k jobs in the system.

(edit)I solved this part: Suppose a job comes in and see the server is busy, what is the probability distribution of the running job: As poisson arrivals see the average, each running job have the chance to be seen equal to its duration and he probability of occurring that job is $e^{-x}$. So its distribution is $xe^{-x}$. so the distribution is $Erlang(k=2,\lambda=1)$:

However, I want the conditional probability of that: $P(running~job <x~|~k~job~in~system)$. I checked the simulation and it seems as k increases the model is more like Erlang but with larger $\lambda$. If I know this then I can add it to the distribution of k jobs in the queue (Erlang) and the final problem is solved.

• I'm not sure I understand your question. Oct 22 '12 at 8:35
• Suppose a job comes in to the system and see $k>0$ items in the queue, what is the probability that the running job duration is less than x? Oct 22 '12 at 14:09
• You can ignore my previous comment (I deleted it); I had misunderstood what you were doing in your edit, which in fact seems correct. Oct 22 '12 at 17:47

Whether a job starts running without any other jobs in the queue depends only on the durations of the previous jobs, not on its own duration. Thus we can begin the analysis at the point when a job starts running without any other jobs in the queue. The density for encountering it with running time $\tau$ is proportional to the product of the density $\mu\mathrm e^{-\mu\tau}$ for it to have running time $\tau$ and the probability $1-\mathrm e^{-\lambda\tau}$ of another job arriving before it finishes, where $\lambda$ is the rate of arrival. Then normalization yields the density

$$(\lambda+\mu)\frac\mu\lambda\mathrm e^{-\mu\tau}\left(1-\mathrm e^{-\lambda\tau}\right)\;.$$

Alternatively, we can use the reversibility of the process by noting that the point at which the job started is the last occurence of either an arrival or a departure of the reversed process, so the distribution for the previous duration of the running job is exponential with parameter $\lambda+\mu$; then a convolution with the exponential distribution for the remaining duration of the running job with parameter $\mu$ also yields the above result.

Whereas the first approach would be cumbersome to generalize to $k$ jobs present upon arrival, since the probability for a job of a given length to be encountered in that state would need to be calculated, the second approach generalizes quite readily: If there are $k$ jobs, the point at which the currently running job started is the last departure of the reversed process or the $k$-th last arrival of the reversed process, whichever is more recent. We can get the tail (i.e. the complement of the cumulative distribution function) of the distribution for the duration since this event by multiplying the tails of the distributions for one departure and for $k$ arrivals. The tail for one departure of the reverse process is $\mathrm e^{-\lambda\tau}$; the tail for $k$ arrivals of the reverse process is

$$\mathrm e^{-\mu\tau}\sum_{n=0}^{k-1}\frac{(\mu\tau)^n}{n!}$$

(see here). Thus the density for the previous duration of the running job given that $k$ jobs are encountered is

$$-\frac{\partial}{\partial \tau}\left(\mathrm e^{-(\lambda+\mu)\tau}\sum_{n=0}^{k-1}\frac{(\mu\tau)^n}{n!}\right)\;.$$

Convolving this density with the Erlang density for $k$ departures of the forward process yields the distribution you want:

$$-\int_0^\tau\frac{\mu^k(\tau-t)^{k-1}\mathrm e^{-\mu(\tau-t)}}{(k-1)!}\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\left(\mathrm e^{-(\lambda+\mu) t}\sum_{n=0}^{k-1}\frac{(\mu t)^n}{n!}\right)\mathrm dt\;.$$

Unfortunately I don't see a way to simplify this significantly; neither moving the derivative to the other factor by integration by parts nor using the fact that the expression being differentiated is $\mathrm e^{-\lambda t}$ times an integral seems to help much.

We can recover the above result for $k=1$,

\begin{align} -\int_0^\tau\mu\mathrm e^{-\mu(\tau-t)}\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\left(\mathrm e^{-(\lambda+\mu) t}\right)\mathrm dt &=(\lambda+\mu)\int_0^\tau\mu\mathrm e^{-\mu(\tau-t)}\left(\mathrm e^{-(\lambda+\mu) t}\right)\mathrm dt \\ &=(\lambda+\mu)\mu\mathrm e^{-\mu\tau}\int_0^\tau\mathrm e^{-\lambda t}\mathrm dt \\ &=(\lambda+\mu)\frac\mu\lambda\mathrm e^{-\mu\tau}\left(1-\mathrm e^{-\lambda\tau}\right)\;, \end{align}

but already for $k=2$ the result is rather complicated:

\begin{align} &-\int_0^\tau\mu^2(\tau-t)\mathrm e^{-\mu(\tau-t)}\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\left(\mathrm e^{-(\lambda+\mu) t}\sum_{n=0}^1\frac{(\mu t)^n}{n!}\right)\mathrm dt \\ =& -\mu^2\mathrm e^{-\mu\tau}\int_0^\tau(\tau-t)\mathrm e^{\mu t}\frac{\partial}{\partial t}\left(\mathrm e^{-(\lambda+\mu) t}(1+\mu t)\right)\mathrm dt \\ =& \mu^2\mathrm e^{-\mu\tau}\left(\tau+\frac1{\lambda^3}\left(\lambda\mu(\lambda+\mu)\tau\left(\mathrm e^{-\lambda\tau}+1\right)+\left((\lambda+\mu)^2+\mu^2\right)\left(\mathrm e^{-\lambda\tau}-1\right)\right)\right) \end{align}

(computation). The first two moments of this distribution are

$$\langle\tau\rangle=\frac2\mu+\frac{\lambda+2\mu}{(\lambda+\mu)^2}$$

and

$$\langle\tau^2\rangle=\frac6{\mu^2}+2\frac{2\lambda^2+7\lambda\mu+7\mu^2}{\mu(\lambda+\mu)^3}\;.$$

I've confirmed these in simulations with $\lambda=2$ and $\mu=3$, where $\langle\tau\rangle=74/75\approx0.987$ and $\langle\tau^2\rangle=476/375\approx1.269$. Here's the code.

• It seems that this is the right answer, but I still don't understand why we can begin analyse from when the queue is empty. As you said this depends on the previous jobs. Now suppose previous job is a very long job, so the probability that I start with an empty queue is very small because lots of jobs may be queued up by now behind me. And this only depends on my previous job Oct 22 '12 at 20:16
• @Masood_mj: It doesn't matter how often or how long jobs queue up since we're conditionalizing on there being one job (or $k$ jobs) upon arrival. This condition affects the duration of previous jobs (they will tend to have been shorter since they're already gone), and it affects the duration of the current job (it will tend to be longer since it's still there), but the condition that a job starts running by itself and doesn't have jobs queued up behind it only affects the durations of the previous jobs (again they become shorter), not its own, since it wasn't running while the queue formed. Oct 23 '12 at 18:42
• @Masood_mj: Anyway, I've added a solution for the general case (and tested it). It uses the second approach, so if you don't like the first approach you can just go with the second one that uses reversibility. If you don't know it already, you might want to look at Burke's theorem. Oct 23 '12 at 18:43