Using Soccer Goals to Motivate the Poisson Process

Singfat CHU - bizchucl@nus.edu.sg
NUS Business School, National University of Singapore, 1 Business Link, Singapore 117592

Abstract

In introducing analytic queuing models, textbooks rarely justify the assumption of the exponential and the Poisson distributions. This paper demonstrates how a real-life phenomenon familiar to many students, namely the occurrences of soccer goals, can drive the ideas. An Excel worksheet is made available for further analysis.

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10.1287/ited.3.2.64

Citation Information
Singfat CHU 2003. Using Soccer Goals to Motivate the Poisson Process. INFORMS Trans. Ed. 3(2) 64-70. Available online at http://ite.pubs.informs.org/.

DOI: 10.1287/ited.3.2.64