Geraint Palmer
Queueing systems dominate our day-to-day life: for example supermarkets, airports, traffic systems, and call centres, naming only a few obvious examples. A better understanding of these queues can help businesses and service providers optimise these systems, improving efficiency, profit and satisfaction levels. Sometimes some unintuitive behaviour can arise, and so modelling and investigating queues mathematically has become very popular and important. One prominent method of doing so is by using computer simulation.
This talk will present Ciw, a new Python library for simulating open queueing networks. This talk will demonstrate using Ciw's simple interface to model and simulate a queueing system, and an overview of it's many features will also be given.
The library is currently being used in two academic settings: one theoretical project that investigates queueing networks that deadlock, and another practical project in which patient flows are modelled in an ophthalmology clinic. Synopses of these projects and their results will be discussed.
