Exam 6: S: Advanced Waiting Line Theory and Simulation Modeling

Frenzied cruise vacationers besiege Tatiana, their excursion coordinator, and her fourteen assistants at the Port of Cozumel when they realize that all water excursions have been cancelled for no reason in particular. It takes them 4 minutes to find the customers an alternative excursion activity and customers cluster around them at the rate of 200 per hour. About how many customers are clustered around them, either receiving service or waiting in line to receive their valuable service if the service times are exponentially distributed and the arrivals follow a Poisson distribution?

The department chair is out of town at a conference and you, as the assistant department chair, find yourself besieged by dozens of students needing permission to get into a very popular (but closed)class. Student arrivals are governed by the Poisson distribution with a mean of 10 minutes. Telling the students that they can't get into the closed class takes about 5 minutes, and this average is exponentially distributed. About how long do students wait outside your office door?

A customer enters a business and has the opportunity to select any one of three lines to receive service. The service is performed by one customer service representative after which the customer leaves the establishment. Which description of this waiting line system is appropriate?

The bank manager of a busy downtown location found herself unable to find good teller help so she invested in an ATM to handle the routine withdrawals that tended to occupy an inordinate amount of the teller's time. Before she installed the ATM she found that customers were arriving on average every 2 minutes (Poisson distributed)and it took a teller 30 seconds (exponentially distributed)to process their request. The ATM is able to maintain a constant 30 second service time. What is the impact on the number of customers waiting in line?

Patrons line up to spin the giant slot machine at the entrance to Ace Rothstein's Tangiers casino. They pour in the door at the rate of 300 per hour and it takes exactly ten seconds every time for the wheels to spin and inform the unlucky patron that they have lost a dollar rather than win a new Corvette. How many customers are in line on average?

In most waiting line models, customers are assumed to arrive at random intervals, based on a normal distribution.

In most cases, simulation models provide optimal solutions to problems just like most of the equations presented in your textbook.

Just before he retired for the evening, Saba started his simulation program to simulate five years of hospital operations as he slept. His ability to generate five years of data overnight is a textbook example of ________.

Monte Carlo simulation uses statistical sampling to create outcomes for a large number of trials.

It is more costly to create a more realistic simulation than one that is less realistic.

Barber College is the best deal in town! For only $5, you can get a shampoo and cut by any one of four untrained stylists completed in 7.5 minutes on average. Perhaps this is why customers show up on average two minutes apart (both arrival times and service times are exponentially distributed). Management is concerned about the waiting time for customers and decides to train one more student. If the arrival and service rates remain the same as in the original scenario, what happens to the number of customers in the system?

All waiting line formulas assume that customers are served on a first-come first-served (FCFS)basis.

Hysterical cruise vacationers besiege Tatiana, their excursion coordinator, and her fourteen assistants at the Port of Cozumel when they realize that all water excursions have been cancelled for no reason in particular. It takes them 4 minutes to find the customers an alternative excursion activity and customers cluster around them at the rate of 200 per hour. About how many customers are waiting in line to receive their valuable service if the service times are exponentially distributed and the arrivals follow a Poisson distribution?

________ is an Excel function that generates a uniformly distributed random number between 0 and 1.

Customers enter the stadium and purchase refreshments before they are shown to their seats by experienced ushers. The customers are considered objects in the simulation model.

Customers pass by any one of forty ticket takers on their way in the arena for a WWE event. This is a single ________ system.

A waiting line cannot be both multiple-channel and multiple-phase.

Figure 6S-1 Customers enter a haberdashery that sells only ascots, cufflinks and suspenders and are served by the owner operator. The owner is the only employee, so if customer B arrives while customer A is being served, customer B must patiently wait until customer A exits the system. Customers are always willing to wait regardless of how long their wait is. The interarrival and service times are uniformly distributed and shown in the table below. Range Interarrival (min) Service (min) 0.000-0.200 3 6 0.201-0.400 6 7 0.401-0.600 9 8 0.601-0.800 12 9 0.801-1.000 15 10 The stream of random number for a Monte Carlo simulation of the system appear in this table> Interarrival Service .114 .979 .899 .297 .925 .162 .085 .574 .824 .235 .151 .593 .223 .956 .477 .845 -Use the data from Figure 6S-1. How many customers are in the haberdashery at 8:02?

The term "time compression" refers to the phenomenon that a server tends to speed up the service process if the waiting line exceeds some critical number of customers.

Which of the following is characteristic of Monte Carlo simulation?