ABSTRACT
What do a fast food restaurant, an amusement park, a bank, an airport security check point, and a post office all have in common? Answer: you are certainly bound to wait in a line before getting served at all these places. Such types of queues or waiting lines are found everywhere: computer-communication networks, production systems, transportation services, and so on. To efficiently utilize manufacturing and service enterprises, it is critical to effectively manage queues. To do that, in this chapter, we present a set of analytical techniques collectively called queueing theory. The main objective of queueing theory is to develop formulae, expressions, or algorithms for performance metrics, such as the average number of entities in a queue, mean time spent in the system, resource availability, probability of rejection, and the like. The results from queueing theory can directly be used to solve design and capacity planning problems, such as determining the number of servers, an optimum queueing discipline, schedule for service, number of queues, system architecture, and
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the like. Besides making such strategic design decisions, queueing theory can also be used for tactical as well as operational decisions and controls.
