THE APPLICATION OF QUEUEING THEORY TO THE CUSTOMER SERVICE OPERATORS OF NNPC MEGA STATION, ITAM AKWA IBOM STATE

This research work applies queuing theory to the customer service operation of NNPC Mega Station Itam, Akwa Ibom State. The data was obtained by personal observation for a period of two days (7am – 2pm daily) in March 2023. In the analysis, chi-square goodness of fit test was used to see if the inter-arrival and service times follows exponential distribution. The result showed that the inter-arrival and service times are not exponentially distributed then the G|G|C model was used. The G|G|C queuing model was used to estimate the key performance measures such as waiting time and queue length. From the result, the arrival rate (λ), of 231 customers was , while the service rate (µ) was , the server utilization (traffic intensity), (ρ) was , Probability that there is no customer in the system, (P0) was . The probability that on an arrival, a customer joins a queue, P(n ≥ C) was , the expected number of customers in the waiting line (queue), Lq was ≈ 13 customers, the expected number of customers in the system (Ls) was ≈ 16 customers, the expected waiting time in the queue (Wq) was ≈ 40 minutes and the expected waiting time in the system (Ws) was 49.5952 50 minutes. Strategies was proposed to improve efficiency and reduce customer’s wait times by calculating the performance measure with one additional server. Result showed that queuing theory is a powerful tool and has the potential to enhance the performance measures of NNPC mega station Itam, Akwa Ibom.