QUEUEING THEORY REVISITED: SOME NEW RESULTS. 14TH AUSTRALIAN TRANSPORT RESEARCH FORUM, PERTH 20-22 SEPTEMBER 1989; FORUM PAPERS. VOLUMES 1 AND 2

Queueing theory provides an unassailable rationale for most discrete flow problems -cars on the road, customers at cash register channels, travellers at baggage counters, trucks at loading docks, ships in port. Most importantly it demonstrates that traffic congestion is not an evil, per se, but rather a feedback mechanism that spreads the peak, changes the route or mode and eventually brings the land-use and transport resources into balance. It is also a most useful tool for the operational analysis and functional design of transport facilities and systems. It is surprising therefore that it is not more generally applied in the on the job sense. One reason perhaps is that, with the exception of the most simple situations, the analytical results are clumsy and awkward to evaluate. In this paper the authors discuss the results of some recent research on the development of simple and widely applicable formulae that give accurate results for both single and multiple channel queueing systems and take account of a wide range of traffic handling characteristics. The intractable problem of time dependent demands and computer simulation techniques are also discussed (a). For the covering record of the forum, see IRRD no 822808.