"These courageous men and women volunteer: they accept that they will have to stand between armed criminals and the public in life and death situations, which demand split second decision-making".
Consumers receive a discount regardless of market profile, product demand split or contract type.
A user's behaviour is determined by two factors: her market demand profile, and her product demand split.
Figures 4 and 6 show that consumers make a cost-saving regardless of profile, product demand split or instrument.
Currently, non-determinism in the simulation is introduced through the random selection of instance sizes chosen from the product demand split normal distribution.
A user's product demand split (PDS) defines the probability, for each instance type, that that instance type will be required in a time period by the user.
We explore: demand splitting, route differentiation, offline holding, online holding, and prepayment; all of which are applied locally at the transfer stop, and affecting only the feeders.
From Figure 3, it can be seen that the combined pricing method via options contracts offers improvements in server utilisation compared to on-demand only pricing, but only when the mean product demand split is greater than three.
Furthermore, the combined pricing method using options contracts also makes improvements in server utilisation compared to traditional advance reservations (forward contracts) when the product demand split has a mean greater than three.
In these experiments, there is a 'tipping-point' when the product demand split mean is 4 where the loss in utilisation caused by user's choosing not to execute their options is less than the utilisation gained by advance scheduling.
