Estimate Wait Time with Little's Law
Use Little's Law to reason about towing queue length, arrival rate, and customer wait time.
A towing dispatcher has 8 open calls at 6:00 p.m. New calls are arriving at 6 per hour. The fleet is completing about 4 calls per hour. Decide what the wait promise should account for. Little's Law: work in process equals arrival rate times time in system; unstable queues grow when arrivals exceed completions. The trap is quoting wait time from the oldest current call while ignoring that new calls are entering faster than drivers are clearing work. That makes every later promise too optimistic. Read the board Open calls now: 8. Arrival rate: 6 calls/hour. Completion rate: 4 calls/hour.…
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