Modeling of manufacturing lines and data communications makes frequent use of tandem queues with blocking. Here we present and study such a system with a k-stage blocking scheme in which processing in each station requires attendance of the server of that station together with the servers of the next k – 1 stations. This scheme describes the conventional manufacturing and communications blocking schemes but is also representative of a wider range of applications. Explicit expressions for residence times, throughput, queueing times, waiting times and other measures of performance are obtained for the case of communications type flow and just-in-time input. Use of the results in modeling and analyzing a highway traffic flow situation is presented.

The average number of vehicles being able to enter an intersection per time unit from a minor road with a stop or yield sign — the capacity of the intersection — depends on the density of the traffic stream on the major road. In case the time-process of the major road traffic at the intersection is a non-homogeneous Poisson process with a periodic intensity function the capacity is calculated and compared with the capacity in the homogeneous case.