Shovel-truck queues: A reconciliation of theory and practice

Queueing theory offers the prospect of a useful management and planning tool for shovel-truck type operations; it is conceptually and intuitively satisfying as a model while being able to be transformed into a form usable by practising engineers. It remains to fully examine the assumptions on which queueing theory is based in the light of available field measurements. The paper answers questions relating to the assumptions on the service discipline, on steady-state behaviour and on the probability distributions for the backcycle and service times.