A clearing system with impatient passengers: asymptotics and estimation in a bus stop model

Abstract

At some location buses stop to pick up the passengers waiting there and leave immediately, empty or occupied. Passenger arrival times as well as bus arrival times form independent renewal processes. Every passenger is willing to wait for a random amount of time before leaving, and every bus takes away all waiting passengers. For this pickup model, we study the distributions of the number of waiting passengers and of the individual sojourn times. The sojourn times lead to a Markov chain embedded in the superposition of the two underlying renewal arrival processes, for which we study its convergence toward stationarity.