Assignment Examples
Assignment Examples
a. The arrival rate is given in the problem: = 16 customers per hour. Change the service time
to a comparable hourly rate. Thus,
60 minutes per hour/3minutes per customer = = 20 customers per hour
b. r = / = 16/20 = 0.80 customers
c. Lq = 3.2, Ls = 3.2+0.8 = 4.0 Customers
Wq = 3.2/16 = 12minutes, Ws = 15minutes
2. An airline is planning to open a satellite ticket desk in a new shopping plaza, staffed by
one ticket agent. It is estimated that requests for tickets and information will average 15
per hour, and requests will have a Poisson distribution. Service time is assumed to be
exponentially distributed. Previous experience with similar satellite operations suggests
that mean service time should average about three minutes per request. Determine each of
the following:
1. System utilization.
2. Percentage of time the server (agent) will be idle.
3. The expected number of customers waiting to be served.
4. The average time customers will spend in the system.
5. The probability of zero customers in the system and the probability of four
customers in the system.
3. Wandas Car Wash & Dry is an automatic, five-minute operation with a single bay. On a
typical Saturday morning, cars arrive at a mean rate of eight per hour, with arrivals
tending to follow a Poisson distribution. Find
1. The average number of cars in line.
4. Alpha Taxi and Hauling Company has seven cabs stationed at the airport. The company
has determined that during the late-evening hours on weeknights, customers request cabs
at a rate that follows the Poisson distribution with a mean of 6.6 per hour. Service time is
exponential with a mean of 50 minutes per customer. Assume that there is one customer per
cab.
with M = 7,
5. Alpha Taxi and Hauling also plans to have cabs at a new rail station. The expected
arrival rate is 4.8 customers per hour, and the service rate (including return time to the rail
station) is expected to be 1.5 per hour. How many cabs will be needed to achieve an average
time in line of 20 minutes or less?
= 4.8 customers per hour
M=?
= 3.0.)
Five crews will minimize the total cost. Because the total cost will continue to increase once
the minimum is reached, it is not really necessary to compute total costs for crew sizes larger
than six, because total cost increased as the crew size was increased from five to six,
indicating that a crew of five is optimal.
7. Determine the maximum length of a waiting line for specified probabilities of 95 percent
and 98 percent, for a system in which M = 2, = 8 per hour, and = 5 per hour.
8. A machine shop handles tool repairs in a large company. As each job arrives in the shop,
it is assigned a priority based on urgency of the need for that tool. Requests for repair can
be described by a Poisson distribution. Arrival rates are: 1 = 2 per hour, 2 = 2 per hour,
and 3 = 1 per hour. The service rate is one tool per hour for each server, and there are six
servers in the shop. Determine the following information.
9. The manager of the repair shop, after consulting with the managers of the departments
that use the shops services, has revised the list of tools that are given the highest priorities.
This is reflected by revised arrival rates. Suppose that the revised rates are: 1 = 1.5, 2 =
2.5, and 3 remains unchanged at 1.0. Determine the following information:
a) The system utilization.
b) The average waiting time for units in each priority class.
= k = 1.5 + 2.5 + 1.0 = 5.0 customers per hour
M = 6 servers
= 1 customer per hour
a.
b.
10. One operator loads and unloads a group of five machines. Service time is exponentially
distributed with a mean of 10 minutes per cycle. Machines run for an average of 70 minutes
between loading and unloading, and this time is also exponential. Find:
T = 10 minutes
M=1
U = 70 minutes
a.
b.
c.
11. Suppose that in Example 10 operators are paid $10 per hour, and machine downtime
costs $16 per hour. Should the department add another operator if the goal is cost
optimization?
Compare the total cost of the present system with the expected total cost of the proposed system:
Hence, the present system is superior because its total cost is less than the expected total cost
using two operators.