Letter to the Editor—The Effect of Introducing Priorities

The theory of queues has studied many types of situation of customers waiting to be served at a counter, or material waiting to be processed by a machine. It is naturally interesting to see how the order in which customers get served affects various types of queues. One way of dealing with customers is to serve them in order of arrival, another is to give precedence to customers likely to require a short service time. The former is known as ‘first-come, first-served’ discipline and the latter is a kind of ‘priority’ discipline. This paper aims to compare the two disciplines.