Exam 18: Waiting Line

A bank lobby with six teller windows,each with a separate line,is an example of a:

Scenario B.4 Customers arrive at an airline ticket counter at the rate of 50 customers per hour,according to a Poisson distribution.There are three ticket agents.Customers select the first available agent from one line.Each agent can process 20 customers per hour with exponential service times. -Use the information in Scenario B.4.What is the average number of customers waiting in line for service?

What are the assumptions of the exponential distribution applied to the single server queuing situation? Provide examples of when these assumptions might be violated.

A bank that dedicates one window for commercial account customers and one window for personal account channel has two channels.

If the nature of the customer population,constraints on the line,the priority rule,and the service time distribution renders waiting line theory no longer useful,then an operations manager should rely on:

The best method for analyzing a waiting-line problem is to relate the five operating characteristics and their alternatives to dollars.

Scenario B.3 Customers arrive at a bank for service,forming a single line to wait for the first available of three tellers.They arrive at the rate of 45 per hour and are served by the first available teller,who can service customers at a rate of 20 per hour,following a Poisson distribution.Customer arrival times are governed by the exponential distribution. -Use the information in Scenario B.3.What is the average number of customers in the system?

You drive your car into the parking lot of your favorite fast food establishment and get in the line for drive through service.After placing your order into the speaker,you proceed to the first window to pay,and then to the second window to pick up your meal.Since you just studied waiting lines that day in your Operations Management class,you quickly realize as you drive away that this was an example of a ________ channel ________ phase queuing system.

Customers are serviced at a rate of six customers per hour according to an exponential distribution.What is the probability that customer service will require fewer than 20 minutes?

The delivery wagon that the hominy man had used for the last three decades was beyond repair,so he decided to open a hominy stand at a busy intersection in downtown Luther.Customers arrive at the rate of 8 per hour and it takes 5 minutes on average to fill their buckets with hominy. a.What is the likelihood that the line is longer than three people? b.What is the average waiting time in line? c.What is the average number of customers in line?

The production rate has been steady at 20 units per hour.The average work-in-process inventory at this station is 15 units.What is the average lead time through this manufacturing station?

With a single-server model,increasing the capital-to-labor ratio will most likely:

A professor's teaching assistants sit in their communal office and answer questions from students the afternoon before the final exam.The class is a mass lecture of 350 students,and the teaching assistants have final exams of their own,so they concentrate on providing explanations as quickly as possible.On average,the three teaching assistants can answer 30 questions an hour and students arrive at their office every five minutes.Student arrivals are Poisson distributed,each student has only one question and answer times are exponentially distributed. a.What fraction of their time do the teaching assistants spend answering questions? b.What is the average number of students waiting outside their office? c.What is the average time a student spends in line outside the teaching assistants' office and having their question answered?

With a multiple-server model,increasing the arrival rate by 10 percent and also increasing the service rate of each server by 10 percent will result in:

Customers arrive at the local grocery store at a steady rate of 40 an hour.Thirty percent of these customers purchase 10 items or less and go to the express line where they enjoy an average checkout time of 5 minutes.Customers that don't meet the express line criterion go to checkout line #2 where they spend an average of 10 minutes checking out.How many people are checking out in both lines on average?

Preemptive discipline allows a customer of higher priority to interrupt the service process of another customer.

In the single-server model the:

Explain how waiting lines can develop even when the service time is a constant.

Customers arrive according to a Poisson distribution.The average number of customer arrivals per hour is six.The probability that four customers will arrive in the next three hours is:

Comment on the tension between cost management and customer satisfaction management in a call center situation.