Teaching elementary queueing theory with a computer algebra system
Sue Fitzgerald, Jerry Place · ACM SIGCSE Bulletin · 1995
Computer algebra systems such as Maple, Mathematica and MACSYMA are readily available for a wide range of PC's and workstations. Many college campuses have site licenses for these software tools and make them widely available to students through PC labs, across networks and on time sharing systems. Additionally student versions of these software tools are widely available at nominal cost. Computer algebra systems provide sophisticated computational support and are intuitive to use. In this paper we describe how we use a computer algebra system to support an upper division undergraduate course teaching elementary queueing theory. We discuss the significant enhancement added by using a computer algebra system for this course work. We present the traditional approach to this material, i.e., deriving the closed form solutions for a specific queueing model then we show how we approach the material using numerical solutions based on the general equations for steady state probabilities for a Poisson Birth-Death process. We present several examples and discuss the strengths of our approach.