The Research On The Application Of The Queuing Theory In The Checkout Counter Service System Of Supermarket

The queuing theory (called stochastic service system) is an important branch ofoperational research. It is a mathematics subject which studies the crowdedphenomenon affected by random factors. It studies different kinds of servicesystem’s probability characteristic in the queue of waiting, to guide the systemsoptimal design and optimal operating strategies.With the development of the society, queuing has been close with our daily life.People will feel depressed when they are at the checkout counters after shopping. Itwill make people cancel the shopping sometimes because they have to wait for along time. It is necessary and crucial for the managers of the supermarkets andemporiums to provide best service with the lowest cost to save customers’ time.Therefore, the optimization of supermarket’s queueing system according to theknowledge of queueing theory has the practical significance.The computer simulation is to simulate the studied system’s internal structure,function and the behavior with computer. Because of wide application of thequeueing theory and because of the characteristics and rules of queueing andservice organization being more and more complex, the analytic method has beenunable to solve. But the computer simulation is a very effective method to solve thequeueing system and to analyze queuing system’s performance. And the computersimulation has advantages of low cast, fast speed and high accuracy. Thecombination of queueing theory and computer simulation is the inevitable trend ofqueueing theory in future.In the preliminary knowledge part, the thesis introduced four kinds ofprobability distribution, two kinds of stochastic process and basic knowledge relatedto statistical test and the queuing theory. Then, the thesis applied some theoriesrelated to the queuing theory and it abstracted the Checkout Counter Service Syst emas a mathematical model which is the M/M/c/queuing system. The modelwhich meets some certain conditions is the optimal one. It also analyzed theadvantages and disadvantages of the mathematical model based on a lot of data ofone supermarket in Harbin collected by the author and put forward some practicalsuggestions. On the base of considering the benefit of both customers andsupermarkets, the thesis put forward a better solution that made the customers waitshortest with shortest queues and made the supermarkets provide the least checkout counters. Finally, the thesis introduced the concept and history of computersimulation and simulated the queuing system of the supermarket. It also analyzedthe data combined with the computer simulation.