Queueing Theory

Introduction: A flow of customers from finite/infinite population towards the service facility
forms a queue (waiting line), on account of a lack of capability to service them all at a time. In
the absence of a perfect balance between the service facilities and the customers, waiting time is
required either for the service facilities or for the customer’s arrival.

Examples of such queue in service facilities like:

1. Electricity bill payment

2. Temples
3. Barber shops/beauty parlors
4. Petrol bunks
5. Highway toll gates etc..

The arriving unit that requires some services to be performed is called customer. The customer
may be persons, machines, vehicles etc. Queue (waiting line) stands for the number of customers
waiting to be serviced. This does not include the customers being serviced. The process or
system that provides services to the customers is termed as service channel or service facility.

Queueing System:

A queueing system can be completely described by:

i. The input (arrival pattern)

ii. The service mechanism (service pattern)
iii. The queue discipline
iv. Customer’s behavior

i). The input (arrival pattern): The mean arrival rate is denoted by λ.

ii). The service mechanism: The mean service rate is denoted by μ.

iii). The queue discipline: The most common queue disciplines are:

a. First come first served (FCFS)

b. First in first out (FIFO)
c. Last in first out (LIFO)
d. Selection for service in random order (SIRO).

iv). Customer’s behavior: The customers generally behave in the following four ways:

a. Balking: A customer who leaves the queue because the queue is too long and he has
no time to wait or does not have sufficient waiting space.
b. Reneging: This occurs when a waiting customer leaves the queue due to impatience.
 c. Priorities: In certain applications some customers are served before others, regardless
of their arrival. These customers have priority over others.
d. Jockeying: Customer may jockey (to gain better position in the queue) from one
waiting line to another. This is most common in a supermarket.

Key notations/denotations:

 Mean arrival rate – “λ”

 Mean service rate – “μ”
 Traffic / service intensity – “ρ”
 Ls - Average (expected) units in region
 Ws - Average wait time of customer in unit =
 Lq - Average (expected) queue length
 Wq - Average wait time of customer in queue.
 Po – Idle time /zero customers (free time for the service provider)
 Ln – Average length of non-empty queue
 Wn – Waiting time of non-empty queue.

Outside system Inside system

Length of queue (no of people) Lq Ls
Waiting time Wq Ws

Formulae:

Traffic intensity “ρ” = =

Ls =

Lq =

Ws =

Wq =

Po = 1 – ρ

Ln =
Exercises:
1. Arrival rate of customer at a bank counter follows Poisson distribution with mean of
45per hour, the service rate of counter follows Poisson distribution with mean 60 per
hour.
a. What is probability of having zero customers in the system
b. Find Ls, Lq, Ws, Wq.

2. In a public telephone booth the arrivals on average are 15 per hour. A call on an average
takes three minutes. If there is just one phone, find
a. Expected number of callers in booth at any time
b. The proportion of time booth is expected to be idle.

3. The arrival rate of two wheeler customers at a service station follows Poisson and the
service rate follows Exponential distribution. The arrival rate and service rate are 25 per
hour and 35 per hour. Find the following:
a. Utilization of booking clerk
b. Average number of waiting customers in queue
c. Average number of waiting customer in system
d. Average waiting time per customers in queue
e. Average waiting time for customer in system

4. Vehicles passed through a toll gate at the rate 90 per hour. Average time to pass through
the gate is 36 seconds. The arrival rate and service rate follows Poisson distribution.
There is a complaint that vehicles wait for long duration. The authorities are willing to
install one more gate to reduce the time to pass through the gate to 30 seconds, if the idle
time is less than 10% and average queue length at the gate is more than 10 vehicles.
Check whether installation of second gate is justified.

5. In a railway marshalling yard, goods trains arrive at a rate of 30 trains per day. Assuming
that inter-arrival time and service time distribution follows an exponential distribution
with an average of 30 minutes, calculate the following:
a. The mean queue size in the system
b. The probability that queue size exceeds 10

6. In a supermarket, the average arrival rate of customers is 10 every 30 minutes, following

Poisson process. The average time taken by a cashier to list and calculate the customer’s
purchase is two and a half minutes following exponential distribution. What is the
probability that the queue length exceeds six? What is the expected time spent by a
customer in the system?
7. A T.V. mechanic finds that the time spent on his jobs has an exponential distribution with
mean 30 minutes, if he repairs sets in the order in which they come in. If the arrival of
sets is approximately Poisson with an average rate of 10 per eight-hour day, what is the
mechanic’s expected idle time each day? How many jobs are a head of the average set
just brought in?