Editorial polling systems

This special volume of the Annals of Operations Research contains frontier research papers on polling systems. A typical polling system consists of a number of queues, attended by a single server who visits the queues in some order to render service to the customers waiting at the queues. Polling systems naturally arise in a large number of application areas such as maintenance, manufacturing, computer-communication systems and road traffic. In 2000 Hideaki Takagi (2000)—one of the fathers of the success of polling models—wrote the following: The analysis of polling models gained momentum as queueing systems that are easy to understand, analyze, and extend. The study has been accelerated largely by applications to the modeling of communication, manufacturing and transportation systems. I believe that it is one of the few successful theoretical performance evaluation models developed in the last decades. In 1992 a special issue was published on polling systems in Queueing Systems, edited by Onno Boxma and Hideaki Takagi. At that time they indicated queueing theory for polling systems to be a presently maturing field. One could wonder whether, almost twenty years since its adolescence phase, the area of polling systems might be going through a mid-life crisis, suffering the well-known symptoms of such a period. Fortunately, nothing is less true! Nowadays, papers on polling systems keep appearing in an unremitting pace. This special volume identifies the current state-of-the-art in the performance analysis of polling systems and envisages future opportunities and challenges in this research area.