Every few days, we will be publishing layman’s abstracts of new articles from our prestigious portfolio of journals in statistics. The aim is to highlight the latest research to a broader audience in an accessible format.
The article featured today is from Quality and Reliability Engineering International, with the full article now available to read here.
, , . Control charts for traffic intensity monitoring of Markovian multiserver queues. Qual Reliab Engng Int. 2020; 36: 354– 364. https://doi.org/10.1002/qre.2578
Who hasn’t ever been annoyed by a long line while waiting for a service, especially when it seems to be lasting for an extensive time? In this paper, the authors propose Shewhart-type control chars to evaluate if the system is predictable and the waiting time is within acceptable baselines. These queueing systems are one of the most basic models in queueing theory, but still may find applications in real-life systems, such as in telecommunication networks, manufacturing and service systems, and healthcare systems.
Considering the analytical difficulties in modeling, the authors utilized approximations similar to Monte Carlo simulations. The authors design efficient control charts that identify when the queueing system changes its state and if a greater or a lower number of servers than necessary are in use, consequently leading to system settings that are too expensive or too slow, respectively. That is, the control charts helps to identify that the queueing system is acceptable to customers in terms of short waiting times and is economically viable in terms of the low number of servers. The proposed control charts are shown to be efficient in terms of long periods before signaling a false alarm and short periods before failing to correctly identify changes in the queueing system. Finally, the authors propose some directions for further improvements in this important and practical research area.