Book Excerpts:

This document has been used as lecture notes for the Queueing Theory course at Department of Mathematics and Computing Science, Eindhoven University of Technology.

This course discusses a number of elementary queueing models. Attention is paid to methods for the analysis of these models, and also to applications of queueing models. Important application areas of queueing models are production systems, transportation and stocking systems, communication systems and information processing systems. Queueing models are particularly useful for the design of these system in terms of layout, capacities and control.

In these lectures the attention is restricted to models with one queue. Situations with multiple queues are treated in the course "Networks of queues." More advanced techniques for the exact, approximative and numerical analysis of queueing models are the subject of the course "Algorithmic methods in queueing theory."

The organization is as follows. Chapter 2 first discusses a number of basic concepts and results from probability theory that will be used. The most simple interesting queueing model is treated in chapter 4, and its multi server version is treated in the next chapter. Models with more general service or interarrival time distributions are analysed in the chapters 6, 7 and 8. Some simple variations on these models are discussed in chapter 10. Chapter 9 is devoted to queueing models with priority rules. The last chapter discusses some insentive systems.

The text contains a lot of exercises and the reader is urged to try these exercises. This is really necessary to acquire skills to model and analyse new situations.