Can flipping the queue spare you time?
How would you react if we would tell you that serving the last customer in the queue in beneficial?
Drugs dumping in the Netherlands; a gentle introduction to uncertainty and statistics.
Most of you will agree with my girlfriend that when the number of drugs dumping increases for three years in a row, this points to an increase in the demand for drugs, the number of illegal producers, the amount of drugs produced etc. Doing some math you will see this may not be the case.
Traffic congestion: Braess' Paradox
Can you imagine that the, seemingly innocent and quite natural, idea to build more roads in order to solve the traffic problem can be sometimes quite a bad idea.
Layered networks III: The math behind manufacturing plants design
Earlier, we have seen that layered queueing networks are found in manufacturing plants, as well as many other applications in society. The math behind such networks is much more challenging than traditional queueing networks.
Stochastic models for random-access networks
Wireless communication networks play a crucial role in connecting laptops, smartphones, sensors and countless physical devices, and in exchanging data among persons, computer brains and other parts of our information society.
Layered networks II: The layered character of manufacturing plants
We have seen that queueing networks can be a great aid to answering such design questions. In this article, we look more closely at what queueing networks in manufacturing plants look like. It turns out that they have a very distinctive feature in that they are layered.
Layered networks I: From manufacturing plants to queueing networks
Manufacturing plants convert raw material into a final product. Think of cars, where the production line consists of a large number of phases to put all the different parts together into a working car. Big machines in such a plant perform the processing steps in different phases, which often have to be done in a specific order.
Traffic congestion: Pigou's example
In network congestion models, we make some simplifying assumptions that make our life easier. In a large-scale system, each individual driver contributes a tiny amount to congestion, if we assume that every car controls the same amount of traffic.