Queue length computation of time-dependent queueing networks and its application to blood collection

Although uniformization is generally perceived to be too computationally prohibitive, we show that our method is very effective for practical instances, as shown with a Dutch blood collection site. The results shown in this paper take a matter of seconds to compute. The objective of the results is twofold: (1) to show that the time-dependent queueing network approach is imperative for some queueing networks, including this application and (2) to evaluate possible improvement scenarios for Dutch blood collection sites that can only be properly assessed with a time-dependent queueing method.