COVID-19 has been spreading all around the world, and threatening global health. In this situation, identifying and isolating infected individuals rapidly has been one of the most important measures to contain the epidemic. However, the standard diagnosis procedure with RT-PCR (Reverse Transcriptase Polymerase Chain Reaction) is costly and time-consuming. For this reason, pooled testing for COVID-19 has been proposed from the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic to reduce the cost and time of identifying the COVID-19 infection. For pooled testing, how many samples are tested in group is the most significant factor to the performance of the test system. When the arrivals of test requirements and the test time are stochastic, batch-service queueing models have been utilized for the analysis of pooled-testing systems. However, most of them do not consider the false-negative test results of pooled testing in their performance analysis. For the COVID-19 RT-PCR test, there is a small but certain possibility of false-negative test results, and the group-test size affects not only the time and cost of pooled testing, but also the false-negative rate of pooled testing, which is a significant concern to public health authorities. In this study, we analyze the performance of COVID-19 pooled-testing systems with false-negative test results. To do this, we first formulate the COVID-19 pooled-testing systems with false negatives as a batch-service queuing model, and then obtain the performance measures such as the expected number of test requirements in the system, the expected number of RP-PCR tests for a test sample, the false-negative group-test rate, and the total cost per unit time, using the queueing analysis. We also present a numerical example to demonstrate the applicability of our analysis, and draw a couple of implications for COVID-19 pooled testing.

Priority disciplines are an important scheme for service systems to differentiate their services for different classes of customers. (N, n)-preemptive priority disciplines enable system engineers to fine-tune the performances of different classes of customers arriving to the system. Due to this virtue of controllability, (N, n)-preemptive priority queueing models can be applied to various types of systems in which the service performances of different classes of customers need to be adjusted for a complex objective. In this paper, we extend the existing (N, n)-preemptive resume and (N, n)-preemptive repeat-identical priority queueing models to the (N, n)-preemptive repeat-different priority queueing model. We derive the queue-length distributions in the M/G/1 queueing model with two classes of customers, under the (N, n)-preemptive repeat-different priority discipline. In order to derive the queue-length distributions, we employ an analysis of the effective service time of a low-priority customer, a delay cycle analysis, and a joint transformation method. We then derive the first and second moments of the queue lengths of high- and low-priority customers. We also present a numerical example for the first and second moments of the queue length of high- and low-priority customers. Through doing this, we show that, under the (N, n)-preemptive repeat-different priority discipline, the first and second moments of customers with high priority are bounded by some upper bounds, regardless of the service characteristics of customers with low priority. This property may help system engineers design such service systems that guarantee the mean and variance of delay for primary users under a certain bounds, when preempted services have to be restarted with another service time resampled from the same service time distribution.

This paper deals with a first-come, first-served qucueing model to analyze the behavior of heterogeneous finite source system with a single server. Each sources and the processor are assumed to operate in independently Markovian environments, respectively