Queuing Theory In Waiting Line

Related Literature

Literature available on waiting line management indicates that waiting in line or queue causes inconvenience to customers and economic costs to individuals and organizations. Hospitals, airline companies, banks, manufacturing firms etc., try to minimize the cost involved in waiting and the cost of providing service to their customers.

Therefore, speed of service is very important and increasingly becoming a competitive parameter. It is very common for customers to overestimate the time which they spend for waiting. As the perceived time of waiting increases, customers get dissatisfaction (Katz et al., 1991).

Queuing models provide a large number of alternative mathematical models for describing a waiting-line situation. Mathematical

Queuing theory has been used extensively in the banking industry to increase business by careful placement of merchandising materials while at the same time alleviating both the actual perceived amount of time a customer spends waiting in line. Queuing theory provides long-run steady state performance measures and is thus a good fit for making long-term strategic decisions. Crowley et al. (1995) present a queuing analysis performed during the initial design of a production facility for electromechanical devices. The procedure, described as flow ratio analysis, is based on Jackson’s queuingnetworks and provides an early estimate for labor and resource requirements before the construction of a more detailed simulation model.

There are two ways to increase customers’ satisfaction with regard to waiting time: by decreasing actual waiting time and through enhancing customer’s waiting experience.

If the organizations cannot control the actual duration of the waiting, then it might consider how it manipulates the perceived wait time. As Taylor et al. (1994) have observed, the perceived waiting time is usually different from the actual waiting time. It means that understanding the factors that affect the perceptions of waiting and their subsequent

He also described a queuing simulation for a multiple server process as well as for single queue models. Sztrik, J. (2010) discussed about the Queuing theory and some mathematical models of queuing systems. Mehandiratta, R.

(2011) attempted to analyze the Queuing theory and instances of using the theory in health care organizations around the world and benefits acquired for the same.

Queuing theory is basically a mathematical approach which is applied to the analysis of waiting lines within the field of operations management (Nosek and Wilson,

2001). Any system in which arrivals of customers place demand upon a finite capacity resource may be termed as a queuing system (Singh, 2007). Gorney (1981) and Bunday

(1996) argue that Queuing theory uses queuing or mathematical models as well as performance measures to assess and improve the flow of customers through a queuing system. A good flow of customers means that the customers queuing is minimized whilepoor customers flow means customers suffer considerable queuing delays (Hall, 2006).

Queuing theory can be diversely applied and has been used mainly by the service industries

(Nosek and Wilson, 2001). A queuing system or waiting lines consists of six