At Disney World, they use a system called Fastpass to create a second, shorter line for popular rides. The idea is that you can wait in the standard line, often with a wait longer than an hour, or you can get a FastPass which allows you to come back during a specified time block (usually a couple hours later) and only wait for 10 minutes or less. You can only be "waiting" for one ride at a time with a FastPass.
I have been trying to figure out the queue theory behind this concept, but the only explanation I have found is that it is designed to get people out of the lines and doing things that will bring in additional revenue (shopping, eating, etc).
Is this why FastPass was implemented, or is there a real visitor efficiency problem that it solving? Are there software applications that have applied similar logic? Are there software applications that should apply similar logic?
Part of the problem I see with implementing something similar in software is that it is based on users choosing their queue. Do to the faster wait cycles in software, I think a good application of this theory would require the application to be smart enough to know what queues to place people in based on their needs without requiring end-user choice.
UPDATE
12 years (and two major updates to FastPass later), Disney's FastPass: A Complicated History gives the in-depth, definitive answer of "it's complicated"
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It's about accumulation, not queue efficiency.
Fastpass works because it makes the individual items in the queue more efficient in "consuming" something. It's not so much a queue like a processor waiting for instructions to execute as it is people waiting in line for food.
In the case of people at Disneyland, it allows them to maximize their fun.
Think about a processor accepting instructions. Each instruction is waiting to get executed in the queue, to perform its task. Now change it up – imagine each instruction is waiting in line not to execute an instruction, but to get something from the processor – each time it hits a processor it is rewarded with a gold star, and its job is to accumulate as many of these as possible.
Fastpass is like allowing the instruction to go somewhere else, to a different processor, to get a gold star there, before returning back to the main processor to get the golds star from it.
In the case of users at Disneyland, they're interested in having fun – accumulating ride experiences. The Fastpass allows for a maximization by allowing the user to find a different ride with a shorter line, so they can accumulate more in a shorter time.