Letters to the Editor—Concerning Simulation and Sixty Years of Queuing Theory

Abstract

Professor Bhat, in his excellent paper, “Sixty Years of Queuing Theory,” (Management Science , February 1969) stresses the difficulties encountered by “operational people” in applying results of behavioral queuing studies done by “theoreticians.” Everyone having worked in this field who did not have an extensive course on complex variables in school will remember the gruesome feeling when at the end of his derivation, he is faced with the inversion of an untabulated Laplace transform. At this stage most operational people will give up and simulate the queue in order to get an answer, particularly in multi-server problems.