According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

Praise for the Third Edition: "This is one of the best books available. Its excellent organizational structure allows quick reference to specific models and its clear presentation . . . solidifies the understanding of the concepts being presented."IIE Transactions on Operations EngineeringThoroughly revised and expanded to reflect the latest developments in the field, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition continues to present the basic statistical principles that are necessary to analyze the probabilistic nature of queues. Rather than presenting a narrow focus on the subject, this update illustrates the wide-reaching, fundamental concepts in queueing theory and its applications to diverse areas such as computer science, engineering, business, and operations research.This update takes a numerical approach to understanding and making probable estimations relating to queues, with a comprehensive outline of simple and more advanced queueing models. Newly featured topics of the Fourth Edition include:Retrial queuesApproximations for queueing networksNumerical inversion of transformsDetermining the appropriate number of servers to balance quality and cost of serviceEach chapter provides a self-contained presentation of key concepts and formulae, allowing readers to work with each section independently, while a summary table at the end of the book outlines the types of queues that have been discussed and their results. In addition, two new appendices have been added, discussing transforms and generating functions as well as the fundamentals of differential and difference equations. New examples are now included along with problems that incorporate QtsPlus software, which is freely available via the book's related Web site.With its accessible style and wealth of real-world examples, Fundamentals of Queueing Theory, Fourth Edition is an ideal book for courses on queueing theory at the upper-undergraduate and graduate levels. It is also a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners who analyze congestion in the fields of telecommunications, transportation, aviation, and management science.

Fundamentals of Queueing Theory

A detailed review of the education sector in Australia as in the data provided by the 2006 edition of the OECD's annual publication, 'Education at a Glance' is presented. While the data has shown that in almost all OECD countries educational attainment levels are on the rise, with countries showing impressive gains in university qualifications, it also reveals that a large of share of young people still do not complete secondary school, which remains a baseline for successful entry into the labour market.

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Education at a Glance

This paper presents algorithms for computing constraints on the position of an object due to the presence of ther objects. This problem arises in applications that require choosing how to arrange or how to move objects without collisions. The approach presented here is based on characterizing the position and orientation of an object as a single point in a configuration space, in which each coordinate represents a degree of freedom in the position or orientation of the object. The configurations forbidden to this object, due to the presence of other objects, can then be characterized as regions in the configuration space, called configuration space obstacles. The paper presents algorithms for computing these configuration space obstacles when the objects are polygons or polyhedra.

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Spatial Planning: A Configuration Space Approach

Spatial planning: a configuration space approach

The book presents the basis of a course intended to provide relevant analytical skills, and also an awareness of, institutional and environmental issues arising in urban situations and focuses on certain urban service systems including delivery services, emergency services, transport services, street maintenance and social services. The following chapters discuss various aspects: 1) introduction; 2) brief review of probabilistic modeling; 3) functions of random variables and geometrical probability; 4) introduction to queueing theory and its applications; 5) spatially distributed queues; 6) applications of network models; 7) simulation in the urban context; and, 8) implementation. (TRRL)

Urban Operations Research

https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/reports/2006/R1238.pdf

A hypercube queuing model for facility location and redistricting in urban emergency services

Queues involve waiting, to be sure, but one's attitudes toward queues may be influenced more strongly by other factors. For instance, customers may become infuriated if they experience social injustice, defined as violation of first in, first out. Queueing environment and feedback regarding the likely magnitude of the delay can also influence customer attitudes and ultimately, in many instances, a firm's market share. Even if we focus on the wait itself, the “outcome” of the queueing experience may vary nonlinearly with the delay, thus reducing the importance of average time in queue, the traditional measure of queueing performance. This speculative paper uses personal experiences, published and unpublished cases, and occasionally “the literature” to begin to organize our thoughts on the important attributes of queueing. To flesh out more of these issues, the author asks for your cards and letters.

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OR Forum—Perspectives on Queues: Social Justice and the Psychology of Queueing

This paper presents an approximate procedure for computing selected performance characteristics of an urban emergency service system. Based on a recently developed hypercube queuing model, the procedure requires for N servers solution of only N simultaneous equations, rather than 2N as in the exact model. The procedure relies on the theory of M/M/N queues in which servers are selected randomly and without replacement until the first available free server is found. The underlying model is intended for analyzing problems of vehicle location and response district design in urban emergency services, includes interdistrict as well as intradistrict responses, and allows computation of several point-specific as well as area-specific performance measures.

Approximating the Performance of Urban Emergency Service Systems

Automatic teller machines and gasoline service stations are two examples of a growing number of “discretionary service facilities.” In consuming service from these facilities, a significant fraction of customers do so on an otherwise preplanned trip (e.g., on the daily commute to and from work). A system planner, in determining the best locations of such facilities, is more concerned with placing the facilities along paths of customer flow rather than, say, near the center of a cluster of residences or work places. We formally model this problem and present a method for determining the optimal locations of m discretionary service facilities so as to intercept the maximum possible potential customer flow. We also show how to determine the minimal number of facilities required to intercept a prespecified fraction of total customer flow. Computational results are included.

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Richard C. Larson

Papers

Urban Operations Research

A hypercube queuing model for facility location and redistricting in urban emergency services

OR Forum—Perspectives on Queues: Social Justice and the Psychology of Queueing

Approximating the Performance of Urban Emergency Service Systems

Optimal Location of Discretionary Service Facilities