Only Slate Plus members can gift Slate stories. Become a member to share 10 free articles a month. Let’s say you and your roommate have a little side business baking rhubarb pies at home and selling ...

The study of how systems with limited resources distribute those resources to elements waiting in line, and how those elements respond. Examples include data traversing computer networks, phone calls ...

“We can use some fancy math to predict how long the line will get,” Keely Croxton of Ohio State says, then apply it to related problems. In response to a listener request, “Marketplace” host Kai ...

Queueing theory rules everything around you. This newest version of our highly accessible, 30-page introduction to queueing theory demystifies the subject without requiring pages full of equations.

Ever since Google announced that access to its then-new email application Gmail would be invite-only at first, startup founders have been angling to reproduce that same kind of fervor for their own ...

Queueing theory and stochastic models provide a mathematical framework for analysing systems in which tasks, customers or data packets arrive randomly and await service. Originating with simple single ...