Burning cars in a parking lot (Q635842): Difference between revisions

Consider a circular parking lot with \(n\) sites, and assume that cars arrive at each site with unit rate. When a car arrives at a vacant site, it parks there, otherwise it turns clockwise and parks at the first vacant site found. The author incorporates fires into this model by throwing Molotov cocktails on each site at a smaller rate \(n^{-\alpha}\), where \(0<\alpha<1\) is a fixed parameter. When a car is hit by a Molotov cocktail, it burns and the fire propagates to the entire occupied interval which turns vacant. The author proves that with high probability when \(n\to\infty\), the parking lot becomes saturated at a time close to 1 for \(\alpha>2/3\), when \(\alpha<2/3\), the average occupation approaches 1 at time 1, but then quickly drops to 0 before the parking lot is ever saturated.