DEPARTMENT OF INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING,

Queuing theory is essentially the study of waiting in line, including how people behave when they must queue up to make a purchase or receive a service, what types of queue organization move people through a line most efficiently, and how many people can a specific queuing arrangement process through the line within a given time frame. Operational efficiency has a major bearing on profitability, customer satisfaction, and business viability in the competitive dining industry. Queue theory, being a discipline of operations research that addresses mathematical waiting queue analysis, comes in handy here to offer mathematical models to help optimize restaurant delivery systems (Hwang and Lambert, 2009).Queuing theory was developed by A.K. Erlang in 1909 to study telephone network congestion but has since been used to manage complex service systems in various industries (Sztrik, 2012).