Application of Queuing Theory

What is a queue ? A queue is a systematic arrangement of anything which is moving in one direction (back to front). Why queues form or why we see them ? There are many reasons as per why they exist, a) When demand is more than supply. b) When there is time constraint on the demand and supply. Definition :- Mathematical modeling of waiting lines, whether of people, signals, or things. It aims to estimate if the available resources will suffice in meeting the anticipated demand over a given period.

History
Agner Krarup Erlang, a Danish engineer who worked for the Copenhagen Telephone Exchange, published the first paper on queuing theory in 1909. He modeled the number of telephone calls arriving at an exchange by a Poisson process and solved the M/D/1 queue in 1917 and M/D/k queuing model in 1920.

Elements of a Queue
a) Input Source b) Queue c) Service facility

Arriving Entities
Queue

Queuing System Served Entities Service Facility

Input Source

What Does a Queue Represent?

Queues represent the state of a system such as the number of people inside an airport terminal, the number of trucks waiting to be loaded at a construction site, the number of ships waiting to be unloaded in a dock, the number of aircraft holding in an imaginary racetrack flight pattern near an airport facility, etc. The important feature seems to be that the analysis is common to many realistic situations where a flows of traffic (including pedestrians moving inside airport terminals) can be described in terms of either continuous flows or discrete events.

Specification of a Queue
Size of input source Input function Queue discipline Service discipline Service facility configuration Output function (distribution of service times)

Applications
Increase production rate at production facility. Increasing the no. of racks in shopping malls. Applying queuing theory to telecommunication for minimization of noise during multi-access. To the design of a communication system for data transmission in urban mass-transportation. Application in SAP for better data access Application in Service industry for better customer experience. Military applications of queuing theory for availability assessment in airspace control systems and prolonged domination over enemy territory. Application of queuing theory for availability assessment in airspace control systems.

Concepts
Arrival rate () the average rate at which customers arrive. Service time (s) the average time required to service one customer. Number waiting (W) the average number of customers waiting. Number in the system (Q) the average total number of customers in the system. Time in the system (Tq) the average time each customer is in the system, both waiting and being serviced. Time waiting (Tw) the average time each customer waits in the queue. Tq = Tw + s The arrival rate, , is the average rate new customers arrive measured in arrivals per time period. Common units are access/second but it can be / min. or /hr. The inter-arrival time, a, is the average time between customer arrivals. It is measured in time per customer. A common unit would be seconds/access. a = 1 /