UNIVERSITY OF SANTO TOMAS FACULTY OF ENGINEERING INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT

RESEARCH ON IE COMPUTER APPLICATIONS Queueing Theory

Submitted by: Evangelista, Lee Jasper Felix, Jocel Angelo Garcia, Paolo Mari Gonzalez, Gran-gil Mercado, Jeremie

Submitted to: Mr. Damirson A. Co IE423 Instructor

January 7, 2012

Part I. Background on Queueing Theory Waiting to get service has been a part of our daily lives. In fast food restaurants, we form lines in front of the counters to order meals and pay for them. In Automated Telling Machines, we line up and wait for our turn to withdraw our money. In theme parks, we follow a certain lane in waiting rails to get our roller coaster ride. These are just some of the typical applications of the phenomena of waiting in line which we refer to as queueing. The concept of queueing is not only limited to human beings; it is also applicable to parts lined up in manufacturing assembly lines for fabrication, job orders that are waiting to be processed in an office, machine break downs that need to be attended by repairmen, customer calls waiting to be answered by customer service representatives, etc. Queueing theory is the mathematical study of waiting lines, or queues. The theory permits mathematical analysis of several related process, including arriving at the queue, waiting in the queue, and being served at the front of the queue. The behaviour of the queueing system is graphically presented below:

INPUT SOURCE

QUEUE

SERVICE MECHANISM

SERVED CUSTOMERS

QUEUEING SYSTEM

To be able to fully understand the elements that make up a queuing system, certain terminologies should be defined first: - the calling population or the source of the customers that are to become a part of the queueing system queue - waiting line generated in the queueing system - built up when up the capacity of the service is less than the capacity of the customers to be served service mechanism - the rendering of the service served customers - the population of customers that are taken out of the queueing system after the service has been rendered input source

y y

For the queueing system, there are two sources of stochasticity: arrival process service process

The principal players in a queueing situation are the customer and the server. Customers are generated from a source. On the arrival at the facility or service area, they can start service immediately or wait in a queue if the facility is busy. When the facility successfully completes a service, it automatically gets a waiting customer if there is anyone in the queue. If the queue is empty, the facility becomes idle until a new customer arrives. Queueing theory enables the derivation and calculation of several performance measures such as the average waiting time in the queue or system, the expected number of customers waiting or receiving service and the probability of encountering the system in different states such as full, empty, etc. having an available or idle servers or having to wait a certain time to get service. To understand the behaviour of the queueing system, certain terminologies should be introduced: interarrival time service time queue size finite source infinite source queue length queue discipline - arrival time between successive customers - time incurred in rendering the service - defines the capacity of the input source, whether it is finite or infinite - source with a limited no. of customers arriving for service - source where customer arrivals is forever abundant - number of customers waiting to be served - represents the manner in which customers are selected from a queue - can be first come first serve (FCFS), last come first serve (LCFS) or service in random order (SIRO) - can also be based on some order of priority - an act of switching from one queue to another in the hope of reducing waiting time - an act of deciding not to join the waiting line due to an anticipation of longer waiting - an act of leaving the waiting line due to excessive waiting - occurs when the arrival rate is far greater than the service rate resulting to an accumulation of large amount of queue

jockeying balking reneging explosive queue

In queueing theory, performance measures can only be derived or calculated under a Steady-State Condition, to which arrival and service rate will become stable at a certain time. Several notations will be used to solve for these performance measures:

N s

L Lq W Wq Pn

- no. of customers in the queueing system - number of parallel servers in the queueing system - customer arrival rate - constant service rate based on one server - expected no. of customers in the queueing system - expected no. of customers in the queue (queue length) - expected waiting time in the system (or expected residence time) - expected waiting time in the queue - probability that exactly n customers are in the system

The queueing models that exist have different characteristics each under caseby-case basis. Some of the queueing models that follow a Poissonian distribution are: y Single-Server Models + Infinite source and no. of customers allowed in the system + Infinite source and limited no. of customers allowed in the system Multiple-Server Models + Infinite source and no. of customers allowed in the system + Infinite source and limited no. of customers allowed in the system Machine Servicing Model

In a typical industry setting, elimination of waiting is desired for faster performance and finishing of jobs and reduced customer complaints and opportunity losses. However, due to limited resources, waiting cannot be eliminated unless we made excessive expenses. Hence, we sought to balance the cost to have customers wait against the cost of providing additional capacity. Analysis of queueing is often useful for designing or modifying service systems. Different service systems involved from a wide variety of industries such as airline ticketing, call center, job order processing, etc. typically encounter the accumulation of queues. These queues are symptoms of bottleneck operations, meaning, the capacity of the service is less than the capacity of the customers. Analysis on queueing is very helpful to managers in designing and planning service systems with the aim of choosing a capacity level that will balance the cost of having customers wait with the cost of providing additional capacity and at the same time, cost-effective. A typical example of this is undergoing a queieng analysis on a fast food restaurant to determine the waiting time for a customer to receive order. This will be compared to tolerable levels of waiting time to determine if the facility meets the allowable time per customer. If the calculated waiting time is found out to be excessively long, the management will make a consideration of modifying the facility layout or providing additional server(s) if needed to accommodate more customers. The reason for such is to lessen the opportunity loss faced by the management on the potential customers balking and reneging. However, this decision will produce a trade-off: an increased level of customer accommodation but increased facility costs or

sustained facility costs but increased opportunity loss for unaccommodated customers. Hence, analysis of queueing has a tremendous impact on the decisions made by the management as it can aid in the determination of expected costs for various level of service capacities. Though classical queueing theory has a huge impact in understanding the behaviour of different service systems, the assumptions on it may be too restrictive to be able to model real-world situations exactly. The complexity of production lines with product-specific characteristics cannot be handled with these traditional models. Therefore, specialized tools have been developed to simulate, analyze, visualize and optimize time dynamic queueing line behavior. Today, through the developments in technology, several software packages have been introduced into the market to accommodate the needs of different firms and agencies for queueing analysis. These softwares have different features and capabilities in solving different queueing models. While these softwares are created for general queueing models, some are industry specific like softwares used to solve queueing network models in Business Process Outsourcing industries such as call centers, etc. Amidst these software releases, different software developments are still on-going as new behaviours in queueing have been developed due to the improved or new industrial processes in todays modern world.