All of us have experienced the annoyance of having to wait in live. Unfortunately, this phenomenon is becoming more and more prevalent in our increasingly congested and urbanized society. We wait in line in our cars in traffic jams or at toll booths ; we wait in line at receipt window to check out ; we wait in line in barber shops or beauty parlors ; we wait in line at post offices and so on, ad infinitum. We, as customers, do not generally like these waits, and the managers of the establishments at which we wait also do not like us to wait, since it may cost them business. Why then is there waiting? The answer is relatively simple. There is more demand foe service than there is facility for service available. Why is this so? There may be many reasons ; it may be infeasible economically for a business to provide the level of service necessary to prevent waiting ; of there may be a space limit to the amount of service that can be provided. Generally these limitations can be removed with the expenditure of capital, and to know how much service should then be made available, one would need to know answers to such questions as, "How long must a patient wait?" and " How many people will form in the line?" Queueing theory attempts(and in many cases succeeds) to answer these questions through detailed mathematical analysis.
Six basic characteristics of queueing processes are explored in this section :
(ⅰ) Arrival pattern of customers.
(ⅱ) Service pattern of servers.
(ⅲ) Queue discipline.
(ⅳ) System capacity.
(ⅴ) Number of service channels.
(ⅵ) Number of service stahes.
In most cases, these wix basic characteristics provide an adequate description of a queueing system.
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