This paper presents a unified treatment of the mathematical properties of the second-order derivatives of the overflow traffic
function from an Erlang loss system, assuming the number of circuits to be a nonnegative real number. It is shown that the
overflow traffic function
_boxclose( a,x ) \widehat A\left( {a,x} \right) is strictly convex with respect to
x (number of circuits) for
x ≥ 0, taking the offered traffic,
a, as a positive real parameter. It is also shown that
[^(A)]( a,x ) \widehat A\left( {a,x} \right) is a strictly convex function with respect to
a, for all (
a, x) ∈ ℝ
+ × ℝ
+. Following a similar process, it is shown that
[^(A)]( a,x ) \widehat A\left( {a,x} \right) is a strict submodular function in this domain and that the improvement function introduced by K. O. Moe [
11] is strictly increasing in
a. Finally, based on some particular cases and numerous numerical results, there is a conjecture that the function
[^(A)]( a,x ) \widehat A\left( {a,x} \right) is strictly jointly convex in areas of low blocking where the
standard offered traffic is less than
−1.
Translated from Sovremennaya Matematika i Ee Prilozheniya (Contemporary Mathematics and Its Applications), Vol. 63, Optimal
Control, 2009.