The Smalltown postal branch employs a single clerk. Customers arrive at this postal branch according to a Poisson process at a rate of 30 customers per hour, and the average service time is...

The Smalltown postal branch employs a single clerk. Customers arrive at this postal branch according to a Poisson process at a rate of 30 customers per hour, and the average service time is exponentially distributed with mean 1.5 minutes. All arriving customers enter the branch, regardless of the number already waiting in line. The manager of the postal branch would ultimately like to decide whether to improve the system. To do this, she first needs to develop a queueing model that describes the steady-state characteristics of the current system.

Objective To model the postal branch’s system as an MM1 queue and then use the analytical formulas in equations (14.7) to (14.11) to find the system’s steady-state characteristics.