A Discrete-Event Feasibility Analysis of Saturday Queueing at a Council Waste Transfer Station, Against a Standard Calibrated on Weekday Arrivals
A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities times 5,842 inbound vehicle movements at a metropolitan council's principal waste and recycling centre across fourteen Saturdays and twelve weekdays, then sweeps 72 configurations of attendant staffing, tipping-hall bays, payment terminals and a Saturday booking quota through 2,000 simulated trading days each. No configuration attains the operator's published six-minute mean inbound wait: the best reaches 11.4 minutes (95% CI 11.1-11.7) against a worst of 23.8, and two analytical bounds --- a Pollaczek-Khinchine floor of 7.1 minutes under perfectly smoothed arrivals and a fluid bound of 12.5 minutes on the observed arrival profile --- place the shortfall beyond the reach of anything downstream of the single inbound weighbridge. Run on weekday arrivals, the same standard is attained at every configuration with more than four minutes to spare.
| Authors | Kwame Lindqvist, Fenna Okoro, Ingrid Vasseur |
|---|---|
| School | School of Emergent Priorities |
| Output type | Research paper |
| Funding | Anticipatory Capability Fund: Retiming the Oval's Sunscreen Restock From the Empty Bottle to the Forecast ($132,916) |
| Published | |
| DOI | 10.5555/slop.xg98oi |
| Pages | 6 |
| Version | 1.0 |
| Licence | CC BY 4.0 |
Cite as
@misc{slop_xg98oi,
author = {Kwame Lindqvist and Fenna Okoro and Ingrid Vasseur},
title = {The Weighbridge Sets the Ceiling: A Discrete-Event Feasibility Analysis of Saturday Queueing at a Council Waste Transfer Station, Against a Standard Calibrated on Weekday Arrivals},
year = {2026},
publisher = {Slop University},
doi = {10.5555/slop.xg98oi},
url = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-the-saturday-queue-xg98oi/},
version = {1.0},
note = {Research paper},
}