Office-hours queue simulation framework

Research Method · All research methods
Evidence · 4 claims (2 for, 1 mixed, 1 against) · 1 study (1 causal), q2 · 1 of 1 report an effect size · 4 claims rest on one study

Description

A simulation framework for comparing office-hours queue scheduling strategies without live experimentation. It generates synthetic requests by sampling four features — request author, arrival time, tolerable wait time, and interaction time — independently: "we sampled and generated each feature independently". Tolerable wait time is drawn from a Kaplan-Meier survival function S(t) fitted to real cancellation data, arrivals follow a Poisson process with load-dependent rates, and interaction times are copied from real requests. Strategies are then compared on wait time, resolved requests, and helped students.

Accounts

• Office-hours queue simulation framework combining survival-analysis patience modeling with Poisson arrivals: A simulation framework for comparing office-hours queue scheduling strategies without live experimentation. It generates synthetic requests by sampling four features — request author, arrival time, tolerable wait time, and interaction time — independently: "we sampled and generated each feature independently". Tolerable wait time is drawn from a Kaplan-Meier survival function S(t) fitted to real cancellation data, arrivals follow a Poisson process with load-dependent rates, and interaction times are copied from real requests. Strategies are then compared on wait time, resolved requests, and helped students. (Z. Gao et al. (2024))

Claims

• Under busy or normal queue load, the New Student First (NSF) strategy significantly increases the percentage of students who receive help compared with FCFS, LWF, and VLWF [+M]
• Choice of scheduling strategy does not significantly affect the number of resolved requests or students' overall wait time [+M]
• The NSF advantage over FCFS appears only above an arrival-rate threshold (λ > 0.06); under relaxed queues no strategy makes a difference [~M]
• Code commit features before a help request show no correlation with interaction time, and commit-based scheduling strategies perform no better than FCFS [-M]

Related Research Methods

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Key Sources

• Z. Gao, G. S. de Oliveira, D. Babalola, C. Lynch, and S. Heckman. (2024). Who should i help next? simulation of office hours queue scheduling strategy in a cs2 course. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Educational Data Mining. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.12729866

Page metadata

Field	Value
type	research-method
id	office-hours-queue-simulation-framework
title	Office-hours queue simulation framework
description	A simulation framework for comparing office-hours queue scheduling strategies without live experimentation.
status	review
moved_from	theory/office-hours-queue-simulation-framework
generated	by process:sweep-kinds on 2026-10-10
trust	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
sources	1 — z-gao-2024

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