5 STAR RESTAURANT

School of Technical Sciences

IE381: Simulation
Semester Project

ARIED,AMRO
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Table of Contents
1.Abstract: .................................................................................................................................................... 2
2.Introduction: .............................................................................................................................................. 2
2.1. Context: .............................................................................................................................................. 2
2.2. Problems: ........................................................................................................................................... 3
3.Methods & Procedure: .............................................................................................................................. 3
3.1. Setting up the model: ......................................................................................................................... 3
3.2. Running the model: ............................................................................................................................ 3
3.3. Solution Approach: ............................................................................................................................. 4
4.Results: ...................................................................................................................................................... 4
4.1. Queue times: ...................................................................................................................................... 4
4.2. Parking Spaces: .................................................................................................................................. 5
5.Discussion: ................................................................................................................................................. 6
6.Conclusion:................................................................................................................................................. 6

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1.Abstract:
Many businesses conduct their day to day activities with little to no planning, mostly relying
on instinct, or just randomly going with a plan and seeing where it leads them. While that tends
to work for a few businesses, most of the time it would lead to irreversible consequences, such
as, customer dissatisfaction, revenue losses and much more consequences that inevitably lead
to the business closing, because of how serious these consequences can be, proper forecasting,
planning as well as simulation must be conducted to ensure that everything is set up correctly
at the correct times and the correct amount, in this research article we will be conducting a
simulation and analysis using the Arena software on a 5 Star Restaurant.

2.Introduction:
2.1. Context:
The restaurant owner already has a plan in place, which includes a three period working day consisting
of breakfast starting at 8 AM to 12 PM, followed by lunch from 12PM to 4PM, and finally dinner from 4
PM to 8 PM with an optional dessert available for lunch and dinner meals, forecasted data for arrival
times, time it takes for customers to order/pay for the meal, as well as several chefs, waiters, and a
cashier, also there is a fixed time of preparation for each meal offered on the menu, moreover there is
forecasted data for the percentage of customers that order meals from each period. The customers can
also eat at the restaurant and pay after they are finished or directly pay for the meal and take it home.

All the restaurant’s operations are based on the following table:

Number of Meal choices/The Meal Optional Dessert

Process Customers % of customers that Preparation Time/% Of
Period each hour order it Time customers
Breakfast NORM(16,4) English breakfast/25% 10 minutes Not available
Arabic breakfast/75% 10 minutes Not available
Lunch TRIA(14,18,22) Seafood lunch/65% NORM(16,3) NORM(12,3)/75%
American lunch/35% NORM(10,2) NORM(12,3)/75%
Dinner NORM(18,2) Seafood dinner/75% NORM(16,3) NORM(12,3)/90%
Brazilian dinner/25% NORM(20,4) NORM(12,3)/90%
Notes:
1. The restaurant currently has 1 Breakfast chef, 1 Seafood chef, 1 American chef, and 1 Dessert chefs as well as 1
cashier and 5 waiter.
2. Food ordering takes NORM(3,2) and delivering the food to the table or to the customer takes 2 minutes.
3. Dessert is offered only to the customers who eat inhouse, 80% of customers from all periods eat inhouse.
4. If the customer chooses to eat in house, a delay occurs in which the customer eats his meal which is
NORM(17,4),NORM(27,7), and NORM(30,5) for the periods listed above respectively followed by waiter delivering
the bill to the table which takes 1 minute then a small delay of NORM(2,1) which the customer puts the money in the
envelope and then another minute for the waiter take the bill back to the cashier followed by 2 minutes of the cashier
processing the bill and finally a 1 minute in which the waiter gives the change back to the customer.
5. If the customer wishes to eat at home, he only takes 2 minutes paying the cashier.
6. All the times listed above are in minutes.

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2.2. Problems:
The restaurant owner wishes to know whether his current plan is worth keeping or a change
must occur, with his priorities being:
1. Knowing the optimal number of chefs for each meal type.
2. Knowing how much parking spaces should be available based on the highest number of
customers at the restaurant at the same time.
3. Eliminating long queues and guaranteeing customer satisfaction.

3.Methods & Procedure:

3.1. Setting up the model:
We started off by constructing the basic model for the current plan the customer owner has in place
using Arena, we also implement all of the times given by the owner in the various processes occurring in
the restaurant, we also setup plots to know the highest number of customers present at the restaurant
throughout the working day from each period and another plot for the customers present at the
restaurant from all periods.

3.2. Running the model:

We ran the model for 72 Hours at first to see evaluate the plan that the restaurant owner has in place
and this was the result:

Based on the first results we can see how there is obviously a problem with the setup, from the figure
above the problem is specifically located in the Dinner and Lunch Periods. However, when we check the
queues section, we also find that there’s problems with the breakfast and dessert queues as well:

We can see in the above figure how big of a problem we have with queue times ranging from 0.26 hours
up to 16.04 hours with the original plan the customer owner has, because of that a change must occur in
the plan.

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3.3. Solution Approach:

Because of the long wait times observed above and because the customer arrival rate is fixed, a change
must occur in order to cater to the customers while also considering cost.

The main change that needs be done is number of chefs available for each more type, because of that
we add two more breakfast chefs, 3 more Seafood Chefs, 1 more American chef, 2 more Brazilian chefs,
and 2 more Dessert Chefs.

4.Results:
4.1. Queue times:
By implementing the changes discussed previously we get the following results:

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4.2. Parking Spaces:

And since the owner also wants to know how much parking spaces to offer, we use the plot
that we constructed for the Work in process to know the maximum number of customers
present at the restaurant at the same time throughout the day:

4.3. Final Arena Model:

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5.Discussion:
We can see from the results above the drastic effect adding a few chefs made to the restaurant
and by using The graph for the work in process above we can see how the maximum number of
customers present at the restaurant at the same was about 31 customers, because of that the
restaurant needs to have at least 31 parking spaces available for the customers.

6.Conclusion:
By observing the results we can see how important it is for businesses to construct simulation
and analysis models for their plans knowing how much of change they could do for maximizing
revenue and reducing cost at times, as well as guaranteeing customer satisfaction at all times
whether it was at parking or the operation queues.

5 STAR RESTAURANT | Second Semester 2019/2020