Queueing Theory and Modern Queueing Models

Opher Baron is a Distinguished Professor of Operations Management at the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto and a cofounder and CEO of SiMLQ. He was a visiting associate Professor at the Industrial engineering and Management faculty of Technion (2009/10) and a visiting Professor at the School of Information Management and Engineering, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (2016/17). He also served as the Academic Director, MMA Program (2021-2023), and the Operations management and statistics area coordinator (2015-2021). He has a PhD in Operations Management from the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an MBA and BSc in Industrial Engineering and Management from the Technion. On the teaching front, Opher is especially proud of the modeling and analytics courses he introduced and teaches at Rotman. On the application front he launched the Covidppehelp.ca platform with his colleagues. This platform has facilitated the flow of millions of PPE items to end-user customers during the global Covid19 pandemic. In 2024 he cofounded SiMLQ Inc. see WWW.SiMLQ.com. SiMLQ automatically constructs data-driven process Simulators (digital twins) by leveraging event log data, Machine Learning and Queueing theory. His research interests include queueing, business analytics, service operations (such as healthcare), autonomous vehicles, and revenue management. Opher's work is published in leading journals such as Operations Research, and Manufacturing & Service Operations Management, and he has won several research and teaching awards and grants, including the 1000 Talents Plan Scholar from the Shanghai Municipal Government, 2017 and the Rotman 2023 Distinguished Scholarly Contribution Award. Opher is active in the operations research and operations management community. He has given numerous invited keynote lectures and seminars, chaired several conferences, clusters, and sessions, and is currently serving on the advisory board and editorial boards of several leading journals.

The main objective of this course is to provide the students with an introduction to the application of queueing theory in operations management.  The course will acquaint the students with introductory knowledge to support analysis of queueing theoretical models for the manufacturing and service industries. We will discuss specific queueing applications and review relevant and interesting queueing methodologies that can be used in your research career (but we have no time to cover them in depth). We will further review some recent development in data driven queueing.

Syllabus_Intro_Queueing_and MOdern_Queue.docx