Comment by tralarpa
4 days ago
> Makes me wonder how much traffic planning and distributed systems could learn from each other
I don't know any concrete example, but since road engineers have been using queueing theory, originally invented for telecommunication networks, for more than 70 years, I would be surprised if models and tools designed for one use case had not been reused for the other.
Think it was the Tannebaum Networking book which has a chapter on queuing theory. Couple of lectures on that, only to find the chapter was concluded with something like: "Empirical evidence has shown that network traffic doesn't follow a possion distribution", so was left with a feeling that the chapter was only relevant for exams.
Models based on Poisson distributions are the simplest type of queue from a mathematical point of view. Introductory courses rarely go beyond that.