←  Dongwook Shin · Teaching
Queueing · single server

Now Serving

A queue is not evidence that you lack capacity. Set the service desk to serve faster than customers arrive, press play, and watch: with no randomness, nobody ever waits. Add randomness — the same arrival rate, the same service rate — and the line appears.

The floor

elapsed 0 min utilization 0.83 now serving —

Customers waiting, over simulated time. With no variability and utilization below 1, this line never leaves zero.

Average wait
0.0
minutes in the queue
Average queue
0.00
customers waiting
Longest queue
0
seen so far
Served
0
customers
Kingman predicts
0.0
minutes, from the formula

Interarrival and service times are drawn from gamma distributions matched to the mean and coefficient of variation you set, so CV = 0 is clockwork, CV = 1 is exponential, and above 1 is burstier than exponential. Leave the seed blank for a fresh run each time, or set one so a whole class faces the same customers.