Total Vehicle elay

Another aspect of interest is individual vehicle delay. Under the assumption of a FIFO queuing discipline, the delay of an individual vehicle is given by the horizontal distance between arrival and departure curves starting from the time of the vehicle’s arrival in the queue. The 160th vehicle to arrive will have the longest delay, 20 minutes (the longest horizontal distance between arrival and departure curves), and vehicles arriving after the 239th vehicle will encounter no queue delay because the queue will have dissipated and the departure rate will continue to

exceed the arrival rate. It follows that with the LIFO queuing discipline, the first vehicle to arrive would have to wait until the entire queue clears (60 minutes of delay).

The total length of the queue at a specified time, expressed as the number of vehicles, is given by the vertical distance between arrival and departure curves at that time. For example, at 10 minutes after the start of the queuing process (8:10 A.M.) the queue is 40 vehicles long, and the longest queue (longest vertical distance between arrival and departure curves) will occur at t = 20 minutes and is 80 vehicles long.

Total vehicle delay, defined as the summation of the delays for the individual vehicles, is given by the total area between the arrival and departure curves and, in this case, is in units of vehicle-minutes. In this example, the area between the arrival and departure curves can be determined by summing triangular areas, giving total delay, Dt, as

1 1 (80 20) (80 40)

2 2 2400 veh-min

tD = × + ×=

Finally, because 240 vehicles encounter queuing delay (as previously determined), the average delay per vehicle is 10 minutes (2400 veh-min/240 veh), and the average queue length is 40 vehicles (2400 veh-min/60 min).