Queuing Model

Waiting line model elements for some commonly known situations:

1. In our everyday activity, there is a flow of customer to avail some service from service facility.
2. The rate of flow depends on the nature of service and the serving capacity of the station.
3. In many situations there is a congestion of items arriving from service because an item cannot be serviced immediately on arrival and each new arrival has to wait for some time before it is attended.
4. This situation occurs where the total number of customers requiring service exceeds the number of facilities. So we can define a queue as “A group of customers / items waiting at some place to receive attention / service including those receiving the service.”
5. In this situation, if queue length exceeds a limit, the customer get frustrated and leave the queue to get the service at some other service station.
6. In this case the organization looses the customer goodwill.
7. Similarly some service facility waits for arrival of customers when the total capacity of system is more than the number of customers requiring service.
8. In this case service facility remains idle for a considerable time causing a burden of exchequer.
9. So, in absence of a perfect balance between the service facility and the customers, waiting is required either by the customer or by the service facility.
10. The imbalance between the customer and service facility, known as congestion, cannot be eliminated completely but efforts / techniques can be evolved and applied to reduce the magnitude of congestion or waiting time of a new arrival in the system or the service station.
11. The method of reducing congestionby the expansion of servicing counter may result in an increase in idle time of the service station and may become uneconomical for the organization. Thus both the situation namely of unreasonable long queue or expansion of servicing counters are uneconomical to individual or managers of the system.