Adaeze Nkemelu

Course convenor. An operations researcher who got interested in queues by failing to fix one, and stayed for the economics.

Role

Convenor

Affiliation

Slop University School of Invented Disciplines

Email

adaeze.nkemelu@slop.university

Contact

Consultation Wednesdays 14:00–16:00, Vestibule Building room 2.11, no appointment needed. Email for anything that cannot wait until Wednesday.

I spent six years modelling patient flow for a hospital network, on the assumption that the waiting was a capacity problem. It was not. The department I was assigned to had enough staff, enough beds and enough hours; what it did not have was agreement about who should be seen first. We could have cut the median wait by a third in a fortnight. It took two years, because the change everybody resisted was not the arithmetic, it was the ordering rule.

That is the experience this course is built out of. I am not very interested in teaching you to compute the mean wait of an M/M/1 queue, though you will learn to, in week 3, and it takes about forty minutes. I am interested in the fact that almost every queue you meet is running a rule nobody in the building can name, that the rule is doing distributive work, and that the people it costs the most are usually the least able to complain about it.

My own research is on queues run by governments: passport offices, visa processing, social security, public housing registers. They are the ones where the wait is longest, the people waiting have the fewest alternatives, and the cost is least often written down anywhere.

I convene this course, give most of the lectures, and mark the final design brief. If you want to argue with something I said in a lecture, Wednesday afternoon is the right time and I will enjoy it.