Queueing theory

Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines, or queues. A queueing model is constructed so that queue lengths and waiting time can be predicted. Queueing theory is generally considered a branch of operations research because the results are often used when making business decisions about the resources needed to provide a service. Queueing theory has its origins in research by Agner Krarup Erlang, who created models to describe the system of incoming calls at the Copenhagen Telephone Exchange Company. These ideas have since seen applications in telecommunication, traffic engineering, computing, project management, and particularly industrial engineering, where they are applied in the design of factories, shops, offices, and hospitals. The spelling "queueing" over "queuing" is typically encountered in the academic research field. In fact, one of the flagship journals of the field is Queueing Systems. A queue or queueing node can be thought of as nearly a black box. Jobs (also called customers or requests, depending on the field) arrive to the queue, possibly wait some time, take some time being processed, and then depart from the queue. However, the queueing node is not quite a pure black box since some information is needed about the inside of the queuing node. The queue has one or more servers which can each be paired with an arriving job. When the job is completed and departs, that server will again be free to be paired with another arriving job. An analogy often used is that of the cashier at a supermarket. (There are other models, but this one is commonly encountered in the literature.) Customers arrive, are processed by the cashier, and depart. Each cashier processes one customer at a time, and hence this is a queueing node with only one server. A setting where a customer will leave immediately if the cashier is busy when the customer arrives, is referred to as a queue with no buffer (or no waiting area). A setting with a waiting zone for up to n customers is called a queue with a buffer of size n.