Queuing theory: Benefits of operating at 60% capacity

You don’t really need the producers to be “idle”, you just have to ensure that if something important shows up, they are ready to work on that. Instead of having idle producers, you can just have them work on lower priority tasks. Has this also been modelled in queueing theory?

[-]Dagon2y113

Definitely, along with switching costs (if you drop a low-priority to work on a high-priority item, there's some delay and some waste involved). In many systems, the switching delay/cost is high enough that it's best to just leave some nodes idle. In others, the low-priority things can be arranged such that dropping/setting-aside is pretty painless.

[-]Viliam2y62

You need to make sure that when something important shows up, (1) the system will clearly recognize that this happened, and (2) the producers will actually be able to abandon the lower-priority task quickly.

I have seen companies trying to implement this, but what often actually happens is that the manager responsible for the lower-priority task just keeps assigning work to the employees anyway. The underlying cause is that the manager's incentives are misaligned with the company goals -- his bonus depends on getting the lower-priority task done. (How would you set up his incentives?)

[-]MondSemmel2y20

Related reading: IIRC the topic of queuing theory features prominently in the great book Algorithms to Live By.

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