Service System
Consider the design of the drive through service area of a fast food restaurant. There are three stations: place order, pay cashier, and pick up food. There is sufficient space for cars preceding the place order station. Your job is to determine the amount of space between the place order and pay cashier stations as well as the pay cashier and pick up food stations in terms of the number of cars. Serving the maximum number of customers possible during the lunch period, 11:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M., is management's objective. Thus, minimal customer lead time must be achieved. Based on previous experience, customers are classified into types, depending on the size of their order.
Relevant data are as follows with all times in minutes:
Embellishment: In the meeting to review your work, it is suggested that the two buffers may be of different sizes but the total amount of buffer space used cannot increase due to physical constraints. Perform the appropriate simulation experiments.
Case Problem Issues
1. Discuss how arrivals to the system will be modeled.
2. Discuss how verification evidence will be obtained.
3. Discuss how validation evidence can be obtained. a. Compute the expected number of arrivals of each type. b. Compute the expected number of arrivals per hour of both types together. c. Compute the utilization of each workstation.
4. List the important performance measures.
5. What initial conditions should be used?
6. For the simulation language that you are using, discuss how to implement the initial conditions. 7. List the buffer sizes to consider in the simulation experiment and tell why these sizes were chosen.