Welcome to the website of the 2019 edition of the Canadian Queueing Conference, which will be held Friday, August 23rd and Saturday, August 24th in Toronto, Ontario, at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

View the full CanQueue 2019 conference schedule here!

The conference is one of the major queueing conferences in North America. The first workshop was organized by Dr. A.S. Alfa at the University of Manitoba in 1999, and the name CanQueue has been associated with these meetings since the 2000 edition in London, Ontario. The goal of the conference is to promote research and applications of queueing theory.

This annual conference provides an important platform for people, including leading Canadian (or international) queueing theorists, applied probabilists, scientists, researchers, engineers, executives, and students, meet to present their new research findings, to encourage collaboration on on-going research, work-in-progress and new initiatives within and also cross interdisciplinary research areas.

Submit your Abstract to CanQueue 2019 - ABSTRACT SUBMISSION DEADLINE: AUGUST 14, 2019

Keynote Talks

Asymptotic Optimality and Heuristics of Base-Stock Policies for Perishable Inventory Systems

by Xiuli Chao, Professor, Industrial & Operations Engineering (IOE), University of Michigan

Abstract: Queueing and inventory are two closely related models for design and analysis of operations systems. In particular, perishable inventory control is an important but challenging class of operations optimization problem; its optimal policy is known to be extremely complex, making it impossible to implement in applications and intractable to compute due to curse of dimensionality. In this talk, I will present a class of very simple and easy-to-compute heuristic policy and show that it is asymptotically optimal when either the lifetime, the demand size, outdating cost, or the shortage penalty cost becomes large, and what’s more, the optimality gap between the performance of this policy and that of the true optimal policy converges to zero exponentially fast. This is a joint work with J. Bu and X. Gong.

Xiuli Chao is a professor of Industrial and Operations Engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to joining Michigan, he was on the faculty of Industrial and Systems Engineering at NC State University. His recently research interests include queueing, inventory control, game theory, supply chain management, and data-driven optimization. He is the co-author of two books, "Operations Scheduling with Applications in Manufacturing and Services" (Irwin/McGraw-Hill, 1998), and "Queueing Networks: Customers, Signals, and Product Form Solutions" (John Wiley & Sons, 1999). Chao received the Erlang Prize from the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS in 1998, and the David F. Baker Distinguished Research Award from Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE) in 2005

Externalities, Optimization and Regulation in Queues

by Moshe Haviv, Professor, Department of Statistics and Data Science, and the Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Abstract: The academic research on queues deals mostly with waiting. Yet, the externalities,  namely the added waiting time an arrival inflicts on others, are of no less, if not of more, importance. The talk will deal mostly with how the analysis of  externalities leads to the socially optimal behavior, while solving queueing dilemmas such as whether or not to join a queue, when to arrive to a queue, or from which server to seek service at. Customers, being selfish, do not mind the externalities they impose on others. We show how in queues too, internalizing the externalities leads to self regulation. In this setting selecting the service regime is one of the tools in one's arsenal. (Joint with Binyamin Oz)

Moshe Haviv holds a B.Sc. (1979) in mathematics from Tel Aviv University, and M.A. (1982) and Ph.D. (1983) in operations research from Yale University. He joined the department of statistics at the Hebrew University in 1984 and with some intermissions, mostly at the University of British Columbia and at the University of Sydney, has been there since, currently as a Professor. He served as head of department there in 2008-2012. Moshe was the  president of the  Operations Research Society of Israel in 2009-2012. His research areas are queueing systems in general and strategic decision making in queues, in particular. This involves models from non-cooperative as well as cooperative game theory. Other areas of interest are numerical issues in Markov chains, and Markov decision processes. Among his publications, a booked titled “To queue or not to queue: Equilibrium behaviour in queueing systems”, co-authored with Refael Hassin and published by Kluwer in 2003. He also published a textbook “Queues: A Course in Queueing Theory” (2013) by Springer. He also published around 75 research papers in prestigious refereed journals (http://pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il/~haviv/).

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