9402505 Sigman This award supports the foreign travel expenses for Dr. Karl Sigman from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research at Columbia University to spend seven months in early 1995 in Japan. Dr. Sigman will be conducting theoretical research with Professor Masakiyo Miyazawa of the Department of Information Sciences at the Science University of Tokyo in the area of fluid flow approximation in open networks. Discrete objects such as bits of data, jobs, and customers, arriving over time to a facility can be approximated as a flow of a fluid. The purpose of this study is to obtain approximations and bounds for system performance in the case when primitives of the model, such as the arrival and processing mechanisms, are general processes. Such approximations and bounds are of interest in areas as diverse as telecommunications, manufacturing and finance, where real systems are becoming increasingly complex and are not easily analyzed through classic queuing methods. Fluid flow models of discrete systems are of interest as providing tools for the analysis of systems that are important yet mathematically intractable. This project brings together the related research interests of Dr. Sigman in the importance of fluid flow approximation to queuing networks with the expertise of Prof. Miyazawa, one of the world's ranking queuing theorists. This award is funded under the auspices of the Center for Global Partnership (CGP) of the Japan Foundation under the NSF-CGP Science Fellowship Program. ***
