RAQFM: A Resource Allocation Queueing Fairness Measure

Fairness is an inherent and fundamental factor of queue service disciplines in a large variety of queueing applications, ranging from airport and supermarket waiting lines to computer and communication queueing systems. Recent empirical studies show that fairness is highly important to queueing customers in practical scenarios. Despite this importance, queueing theory has devoted very little effort to this subject and an agreed upon measure for evaluating the fairness of queueing systems does not exist. In this work we propose RAQFM, a Resource Allocation Queueing Fairness Measure. The measure is built under the understanding that a widely accepted measure must adhere to the common sense intuition of researchers as well as practitioners and customers, and must also be based on widely accepted principles of social justice. We present the methodology of RAQFM and the principles on which it is based. We discuss its properties, emphasizing the way they appeal to one’s intuition. We provide a methodology by which a wide variety of queueing systems can be analyzed to derive their fairness value.