Week 6 Queue Lab: Compare three policies on one log

Run FCFS, Quick Enquiries and the Priority Lane against the same ticket log, then choose and defend one policy for the Office of Everything.

29 March 2027

Three weeks, three policies, one log. This lab puts them side by side and asks you to commit to one, in writing, the way the Policy Trial will.

Before the lab#

Bring your week 4 proposed rule and your week 5 starvation findings.

In the lab#

Office of Everything file — synthetic case material. One day’s full ticket log: six ordinary requests (5 minutes each), one dispute (20 minutes), and one request marked urgent at the Priority Lane dispenser (8 minutes), all arriving within the first ten minutes of opening.

Open the Queue Policy Lab and select Normal Day. Its ticket IDs, exact arrival times and category labels are additional synthetic inputs that make this comparison reproducible; they are not observations from a real counter. Copy the eight-ticket input table.

Compute each wait under FCFS (arrival order), Quick Enquiries (shortest service first), and Priority Lane (shortest service among declared-priority tickets first, then shortest among the rest). Only tickets already arrived are eligible; a service already started finishes without interruption. Break ties by arrival time, then ticket ID. Wait is start minus arrival; service duration is completion minus start. Check your working against the Lab’s service order and ticket table, then lay the three results side by side. Record a helped ticket, a harmed ticket and the mean for each rule.

Choose one policy for the Office of Everything to actually adopt. Write a short defence: name the group your choice favours, name the group it disadvantages, and say why that trade is the right one for a general-purpose front counter rather than a specialised one. Then write one sentence on how someone could exploit the Priority Lane’s self-declared urgency if the counter never checks it — this is not a hypothetical the Office can ignore once the lane exists.

Afterwards#

Keep your chosen policy and its defence; the Policy Trial, due at the end of next week, asks for exactly this kind of comparison and defence against a declared dataset, done more thoroughly than a single lab session allows. Week 7 turns from choosing an ordering to deciding what the Office can honestly tell someone about how long they’ll wait.