Actual Wait Times Research Articles

Plots of Conditional Wait‐Time Intervals Provide Better Information to Queueing System Arrivals

The management of queues is a very important aspect of service operations management. One way to enhance the queueing experience is to provide customers with the most informative and certain estimate of anticipated wait time. This paper develops such a measure—referred to as the conditional wait‐time interval (CWTI)—for queueing systems with exponentially distributed service times. It is especially applicable at the operational level of an organization since it utilizes the most current information on the status of the system (number of customers in the queue at arrival). CWTI is also based on two risk factors that consider the chance a customer's actual wait time is outside of the estimated range. This paper also provides a graphical means to display multiple CWTIs.