IV.

QUEUING ANALYSIS

• Waiting in queues /waiting lines is one of the

most common occurrences in everyone's life.
Anyone who has gone shopping or to a movie
has experienced the inconvenience of waiting in
line to make purchases or buy a ticket. Not only
do people spend a significant portion of their
time waiting in lines, but products queue up in
production plants, machinery waits in line to be
serviced, planes wait to take off and land,,
telephone call, and so on. Because time is a
valuable resource, the reduction of waiting time
is an important topic of analysis.
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 Contd.
• The improvement of service with respect to
waiting time has also become more important in
recent years because of the increased emphasis
on quality, especially in service-related
operations
• When customers go into a bank to take out a
loan, cash a check, or make a deposit; take their
car into a dealer for service or repair; or shop at
the grocery store, they increasingly equate
quality service with rapid service

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 Contd.
• Aware of this, more and more companies are focusing
on reducing waiting time as an important component of
quality improvement
• In general, companies are able to reduce waiting time
and provide faster service by increasing their service
capacity, which usually means adding more servers,
such as more tellers at a bank, more mechanics at a car
dealership, or more checkout clerks at a grocery store.
However, increasing service capacity in this manner has
a monetary cost, and therein lies the basis of waiting
line analysis: the trade-off between the cost of
improved service and the cost of making customers
wait
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 Contd.
• Providing quick service is an important aspect
of quality customer service
• Like decision analysis, queuing analysis is a
probabilistic form of analysis, not a
deterministic technique. Thus, the results of
queuing analysis, referred to as operating
characteristics, are probabilistic. These
operating statistics (such as the average time a
person must wait in line to be served) are used
by the manager of the operation containing the
queue to make decisions.
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 Elements of Waiting Line Analysis

• Waiting lines form because people or things

arrive at the servicing function, or server, faster
than they can be served
• However, this does not mean that the service
operation is understaffed or does not have the
overall capacity to handle the influx of customers
• In fact, most businesses and organizations have
sufficient serving capacity available to handle
their customers in the long run
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 Contd.
• Waiting lines result because customers do not
arrive at a constant, evenly paced rate, nor are
they all served in an equal amount of time
• Customers arrive at random times, and the time
required to serve them individually is not the
same
• a waiting line is continually increasing and
decreasing in length (and is sometimes empty),
and it approaches an average rate of customer
arrivals and an average time to serve the
customer in the long run
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• E.g The checkout counters at a grocery store
may have enough clerks to serve an average of
100 customers in an hour, and in any
particular hour only 60 customers might
arrive. However, at specific points in time
during the hour, waiting lines may form
because more than an average number of
customers arrive

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• Operating characteristics are average values for
characteristics that describe the performance of a
waiting line system.
• Decisions about waiting lines and the management of
waiting lines are based on these averages for customer
arrivals and service times
• They are used in queuing formulas to compute
operating characteristics, such as the average number
of customers waiting in line and the average time a
customer must wait in line
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 I. The Single-Server Waiting Line System
• A single server with a single waiting line is the
simplest form of queuing system. As such, it will
be used to demonstrate the fundamentals of a
queuing system. As an example of this kind of
system, consider Fast Shop Market.
• Fast Shop Market has one checkout counter and
one employee who operates the cash register at
the checkout counter. The combination of the cash
register and the operator is the server (or service
facility) in this queuing system; the customers who
line up at the counter to pay for their selections
form the waiting line, or queue.
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 Contd.
• Components of a waiting line system include arrivals,
servers, and the waiting line structure.
• The most important factors to consider in analyzing a
queuing system are the following:
• The queue discipline (in what order customers are
served)
• The nature of the calling population (where customers
come from)
• The arrival rate (how often customers arrive at the
queue)
• The service rate (how fast customers are served)
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 The Queue Discipline
• The queue discipline is the order in which waiting
customers are served.
• Customers at Fast Shop Market are served on a "first-
come, first-served" basis. That is, the first person in line
at the checkout counter is served first. This is the most
common type of queue discipline
• other disciplines :"last-in, first-out."
• scheduled for service according to a predetermined
appointment, such as patients at a doctor's or dentist's
office or diners at a restaurant where reservations are
required

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 Contd.
• when customers are processed alphabetically
according to their last names, such as at school
registration or at job interviews.
• The Calling Population
• The calling population is the source of
customers; it may be infinite or finite
• The shopping mall has infinite population base
• the repair garage of a trucking firm that has 20
trucks has a finite calling population
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 The Arrival Rate
• The arrival rate is the frequency at which customers
arrive at a waiting line according to a probability
distribution
• For example, if 100 customers arrive at a store checkout
counter during a 10-hour day, we could say the arrival
rate averages 10 customers per hour
• it might be that no customers would arrive during one
hour and 20 customers would arrive during another
hour. In general, these arrivals are assumed to be
independent of each other and to vary randomly over
time

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 Contd.
• The arrival rate (λ) is most frequently described by a
Poisson distribution
• The Poisson Distribution
• The formula for a Poisson distribution is
x
• P(x)=λ e-λ
• X!
• Where
• λ= average arrival rate (i.e., arrivals during a specified
period of time)
• x = number of arrivals during the specified time period

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 Contd.
• e = 2.71828
• x! = the factorial of a value, x
• [i.e., x! = x (x 1) (x 2) . . . (3) (2) (1)]

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• The Service Rate
• The service rate is the average number of
customers who can be served during a time
period
• For our Fast Shop Market example, 30
customers can be checked out (served) in 1
hour
• A service rate is similar to an arrival rate in that
it is a random variable
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 Contd.
• such factors as different sizes of customer
purchases, the amount of change the cashier
must count out, and different forms of
payment alter the number of persons that can
be served over time
• The description of arrivals in terms of a rate
and of service in terms of time is a convention
that has developed in queuing theory

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 Contd.
• The Single-Server Model
• The Fast Shop Market checkout counter is an
example of a single-server queuing system with
the following characteristics:
• An infinite calling population
• A first-come, first-served queue discipline
• Poisson arrival rate
• Exponential service times
• These assumptions have been used to develop a
model of a single-server queuing system.
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DEFINITIONS OF QUEUEING SYSTEM VARIABLES
PP577 of the book.

• λ = the arrival rate (average number of arrivals

per time period)
• µ = the service rate (average number served
per time period)
• λ = mean arrival rate;
• µ = mean service rate

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 Contd.
• Lq = average queue length (average number of
customers in queue)
• L = average system length (average number of
customers in system, including those being
served)
• Wq = average waiting time in queue (average
time a customer spends in queue)
• W = average time in system (average time a
customer spends in queue plus service)

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• The probability that no customers are in the
queuing system (either in the queue or being
served) is
• P0=(1-λ/μ)
• The probability that n customers
are in the queuing system is
• Pn=(λ/μ)n.P0=(λ/μ)n.(1-λ/μ)

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• The average number of customers in the
queuing system (i.e., the customers being
serviced and in the waiting line) is
• L= λ/μ-λ
• The average number of customers in the
waiting line is
• Lq=λ2/μ(μ-λ)

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• The average time a customer spends in the
total queuing system (i.e., waiting and being
served) is
• W=1/ μ-λ= L/λ
• The average time a customer spends waiting
in the queue to be served is
• Wq= λ/μ(μ-λ)

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• The probability that the server is busy (i.e., the
probability that a customer has to wait),
known as the utilization factor, is
• U= λ/μ
• The probability that the server is idle (i.e., the
probability that a customer can be served) is
• I=1-λ/μ=P0

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• and that λ < µ (customers are served at a
faster rate than they arrive), we can state the
following formulas for the operating
characteristics of a single-server model.
• Customers must be served faster than they
arrive, or an infinitely large queue will build
up.
• Queuing system operating statistics are steady
state, or constant, over time
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• Lq =λWq (Little’s Law)=λ2/μ(μ-λ)
• L =λW (Little’s Law)=λ/μ-λ
• L = Lq +λ/μ

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• W = Wq +1/μ=L/ λ
• U= λ/μ
• I=1-u=1-λ/μ
P0=(1-λ/μ)
Pn=(λ/μ)n.p0==[(λ/μ)n](1-λ/μ)

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 The Effect of Operating Characteristics on
Managerial Decisions
• The manager wants to test several alternatives for reducing
customer waiting time: (1) the addition of another employee to
pack up the purchases and (2) the addition of a new checkout
counter.
• Alternative I: The Addition of an Employee
• If a new employee is hired, customers can be served in less time.
In other words, the service rate, which is the number of
customers served per time period, will increase. The previous
service rate was
• µ = 30 customers served per hour
• The addition of a new employee will increase the service rate to
• µ = 40 customers served per hour

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• The addition of an extra employee will cost
the store manager $150 per week. With the
help of the national office's marketing
research group, the manager has determined
that for each minute that average customer
waiting time is reduced, the store avoids a loss
in sales of $75 per week.
• Pp580.

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 Alternative II: The Addition of a
New Checkout Counter
• consider the manager's alternative of
constructing a new checkout counter. The
total cost of this project would be $6,000, plus
an extra $200 per week for an additional
cashier

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 Contd.
• The average waiting time per customer has been
reduced from 8 minutes to 2.25 minutes, a
significant amount. The savings (that is, the
decrease in lost sales) is computed as follows:
• 8.00 min. -2.25 min. = 5.75 min.
• 5.75 min. x $75/min. = $431.25
• Because the extra employee costs management
$150 per week, the total savings will be
• $431.25- $150 = $281.25 per week
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 Operating characteristics for each
alternative system
• Op. Ch Present System Alternative I Alt. II
• L 4.00 customers 1.50 custom 0.67 customer
• Lq 3.20 custom 0.90 customer 0.27 customer
• W 10.00 min. 3.75 min. 3.33 min.
• Wq 8.00 min. 2.25 min. 1.33 min
• U .80 .60 .40

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• However, the final decision must be based on
the manager's own experience and perceived
needs. As we have noted previously, the
results of queuing analysis provide
information for decision making but do not
result in an actual recommended decision, as
an optimization model would

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2. Undefined and Constant Service
Times
• Sometimes it cannot be assumed that a waiting line system
has an arrival rate that is Poisson distributed or service times
that are exponentially distributed which have variable service
times
• Constant service times occur with machinery and automated
equipment
• Constant service times are a special case of the single-server
model with undefined service times
– When customers or equipment are processed according to a fixed
cycle,
– constant service rates are appropriate. Because constant rates are
certain.

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• As an example of the single-server model with
undefined service times, consider a business
firm with a single fax machine. Employees arrive
randomly to use the fax machine, at an average
rate of 20 per hour, according to a Poisson
distribution
• The time an employee spends using the
machine is not defined by any probability
distribution but has a mean of 2 minutes and a
standard deviation of 4 minutes. The operating
characteristics for this system are computed as
follows:pp586.
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 III. Finite Queue Length
• a finite queue, the length of the queue is
limited.
• The basic single-server model must be
modified to consider the finite queuing system
• It should be noted that for this case, the
service rate does not have to exceed the
arrival rate (µ > λ) in order to obtain steady-
state conditions

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 Contd.
• The resulting operating characteristics, where
M is the maximum number in the system, are
as follows
• pp588

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 iv. Finite Calling Population
• With a finite calling population the customers
from which arrivals originate are limited
• E.g. Wheelco Manufacturing operates a shop
that includes 20 machines. Due to the type of
work performed in the shop, there is a lot of
wear and tear on the machines, and they
require frequent repair. When a machine breaks
down, it is tagged for repair, with the date of
the breakdown noted and a repair person is
called. The company has one senior repair
person and an assistant.
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• They repair the machines in the same order in
which they break down (a first-in, first-out
queue discipline). Machines break down
according to a Poisson distribution, and the
service times are exponentially distributed
• The finite calling population for this example is
the 20 machines in the shop, which we will
designate as N

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• The single-server model with a Poisson arrival
and exponential service times and a finite
calling population has the following set of
formulas for determining operating
characteristics. l in this model is the arrival
rate for each member of the population
• pp591

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 v. The Multiple-Server Waiting Line
• Slightly more complex than the single-server
queuing system is the single waiting line being
serviced by more than one server (i.e., multiple
servers). Examples of this type of waiting line
include an airline ticket and check-in counter
where passengers line up in a single line, waiting
for one of several agents for service, and a post
office line, where customers in a single line wait
for service from several postal clerks. Figure 13.3
illustrates this type of
multiple-server queuing system.(pp594)
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 Contd.
• In multiple-server models, two or more
independent servers in parallel serve a single
waiting line.
• consider the customer service department of the
Biggs Department Store. The customer service
department of the store has a waiting room in
which chairs are placed along the wall, in effect
forming a single waiting line. Customers come to
this area with questions or complaints or to
clarify matters regarding credit card bills.
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• The customers are served by three store
representatives, each located in a partitioned
stall. Customers are served on a first-come, first-
served basis
• the queuing formulas for a multiple-server
queuing system will be presented. These
formulas, like single-server model formulas,
have been developed on the assumption of a
first-come, first-served queue discipline, Poisson
arrivals, exponential service times, and an
infinite calling population. The parameters of
the multiple-server model are as follows:
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 Contd.
• λ=the arrival rate (average number of arrivals
per time period)
• µ=the service rate (average number served per
time period) per server (channel)
• C=the number of servers
• Cµ=the mean effective service rate for the
system, which must exceed the arrival rate
• Cµ>λ= : the total number of servers must be
able to serve customers faster than they arrive
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 Contd.
• The probability that there are no customers in
the system (all servers are idle) is
• pp595

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