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Industrial Engineering & Manufacturing vocabulary · Operations Research

Queueing theory

Meaning in industrial engineering & manufacturing, with examples

nounAdvanced term

In industrial engineering & manufacturing, queueing theory means: The mathematical study of waiting lines: how arrivals, service times and the number of servers affect queue length and waiting time.

In Turkish: kuyruk teorisi, kuyruk kuramı, bekleme hattı teorisi

How it is used

Used to size call centers, checkouts, loading docks and machine groups. Key ideas include arrival rate, service rate and utilization. Little's Law (L = λW) links the average number of items in a system, the arrival rate and the average time spent in the system.

Example sentences

  1. Queueing theory explains why waiting times explode when the forklift fleet is more than 90% busy.

  2. We used a simple queueing theory model to decide how many repair technicians we need per shift.

Common collocations

  • queueing model
  • waiting line
  • arrival rate
  • service rate
  • Little's Law
  • simulationA computer model that imitates how a real system, such as a factory, warehouse or queue, behaves over time, so you can test changes before making them.
  • utilizationThe percentage of available time that a machine, person or plant is actually busy working.
  • bottleneckThe slowest step or resource in a process, which limits the output of the whole system, just as the neck of a bottle limits how fast liquid flows out.
  • work in progressProducts that have been started but are not finished yet, such as parts waiting between machines. Often shortened to WIP.

More terms: Operations Research

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