Chapter 104

Using Simulation to Model Queuing

Problem at a Fast-Food Restaurant

Norani Amit and Nurdia Azlin Ghazali

Abstract Queuing system is a process to measure the efficiency of the model in

terms of utilization and waiting time. The queuing process is common in many
locations, including supermarkets, petrol stations, fast-food restaurants and also in
food courts. The data can be monitored using an empirical data which may include
variables, such as arrival time in the queue (server) and service time. This study
describes a queuing simulation for multi-server model. This research focused on a
fast-food restaurant in Seremban. The data were collected on Friday during busy
working hours, from (10.30 am to 2.30 pm). The model was developed using
ARENA simulation software. The main aim of this paper is to describe the beha-
viour of a queuing system and develop a queuing model for the fast-food restaurant
using ARENA. In this paper, queue length, queue time and system time are mea-
sured. It was found that during peak hour, there is a problem with keeping the
customer in queue for a long period of time. The results show that the average
queuing time at the restaurant exceeded the restaurant’s policy.

Keywords Simulation model
Fast-food restaurant
Queue
Multi-server

1 Introduction

Queuing line is one of the most common events in our everyday lives. Queuing
lines can be observed in our daily life activities, such as to pay bills, to purchase a
movie ticket, to pay for food and groceries and also to cash a cheque. A queueing
line forms because the customers have to spend an amount of time to wait before
getting the services. A long queuing line indicates that the service facility has a low

N. Amit (&)
N. A. Ghazali

Faculty of Computer and Mathematical Sciences, Universiti Teknologi MARA
Cawangan Negeri Sembilan, Seremban 3 Campus, Kuala Pilah, Malaysia
e-mail: [email protected]
N. A. Ghazali
e-mail: [email protected]

© Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018 1055

N. A. Yacob et al. (eds.), Regional Conference on Science,
Technology and Social Sciences (RCSTSS 2016),
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-0074-5_104
1056 N. Amit and N. A. Ghazali

service quality, and consequently, increasing waiting time. The reduction of waiting
time is important for service-related company because time is a valuable resource.
In this regard, every company needs improvement in reducing customers’ waiting
time and the total time spends in the system to increase customer satisfaction
through the improvement of service quality.
Queuing theory is developed for predicting the characteristics of waiting line and
can be measured using the quantitative analysis technique. The goal of queuing
theory is to analyse how much time a customer has to wait to be served, to provide
an idea about what can be improved to increase the performance of the waiting line
system and to serve customers faster than they arrive. Waiting time is the time a
customer waits in a queue before receiving the service while the service time refers
to the fraction of the time used by the server to complete the service for the
customer (Seow 2000). Service time in an organization is personal, customers are
either served immediately or they will join the queue if the system is busy
(Odirichukwu et al. 2014).
Fast-food restaurants use standard operating procedure while serving their cus-
tomers. This standard procedure begins with customers placing their orders and
then collecting their food at the counters. The long queuing line usually occurs
during peak hours, especially during lunch and dinner time and also during pro-
motions. According to Ahsan et al. (2014), long queuing lines can be seen more
frequently during the night shift compared to the day shift. The restaurant man-
agement must make sure the customers are not waiting too long for the system,
otherwise, the customers will go to another restaurant and management would
suffer losses due to loss of goodwill. Thus, service time in the restaurant may need
to be improved. This shows that there is a need to model the queuing system at the
restaurant to understand the situation better.
Dharmawirya and Adi (2011) conducted a queuing analysis for customers at the
Sushi Thai restaurant in Jakarta and discussed the application of queuing theory,
while Olajedo et al. (2015) studied the queuing behaviour at a fast-food restaurant
and found that queue size was reduced as the number of servers increased.
Therefore, in this study, the goal is to look at the behaviour of a queuing system in a
fast-food restaurant at Seremban using ARENA, as well as to determine queue
length and system length, queue time and system time.

2 Methodology

Each service system can be characterized by the number of waiting lines, the
number of servers, the arrangement of the servers, the arrival and service patterns
and the service priority rules (Reid and Sanders 2012).
In a service system, the number of waiting line systems can be in the form of
either single or multiple lines. Multiple lines exist when the situation of a single line
is inconvenient or when specialized servers are used. In the waiting line systems,
there are two terms that are used interchangeably, which are server and channel
104 Using Simulation to Model Queuing Problem … 1057

with the assumption that a server or channel can serve one customer at a time.
Waiting line systems also can be described as either single-server (single channel)
or multi-server (multichannel). The difference between single and multiple line
systems are shown in Fig. 1.
The third characteristic of a waiting line is the arrangement of the servers.
According to Fig. 1, the term of phase was used to identify service activity. It can
be defined as a single-phase or multiphase system. In a single-phase system, the
service is completed simultaneously. In a multiphase system, the service is com-
pleted in a series of steps. Two input parameters required in waiting line models are
an arrival rate and a service rate. The arrival rate can be described as the average
number of customers per time period. The customers arrive according to a Poisson
probability distribution. The service rate refers to the average number of customers
that can be serviced during a time period and service times are described by an
exponential distribution. A frequently used priority rule in waiting line is first-come,
first-served (FIFO), which is considered as the fairest method for determining
priority (Sameer 2014). Other priority rules include best customers first, reservation
first, highest profit customer first, quickest-service requirement first and largest
service requirement first.

Fig. 1 Waiting line systems

1058 N. Amit and N. A. Ghazali

Kendall’s notation for the queue is very useful to represent different types of
queues. Kendall’s notations describe the multi-server queuing mathematical model
in Kendall’s notation is the M/M/m model, where the first M indicates arrival
process (Poisson distribution), the second M indicates the service time distribution
(Exponential distribution) and m stands for the number of parallel servers in the
system (Reid and Sanders 2012). The M/M/m model is one of the most commonly
used to analyse the queuing problem (Amin et al. 2014). This model computes the
average wait times and queue lengths, given arrival rates, number of servers and
service rates.
The outputs of the model are as follows:
(i). Average waiting time per customer in the system.
(ii). Average waiting time of customer in the queue.
(iii). Average queue length of the queue.
In this research, the operating characteristic of the fast-food restaurant is con-
sidered as multi-server multi-line single-phase model. Figure 2 shows the flow of
the restaurant’s queuing system. Based on the system, customers arrive at the
restaurant and form queues at service channels. Customers order food and make
payment at service channels and leave the system once service is completed.
Queuing model of the fast-food restaurant can be characterized based on the fol-
lowing components:

Fig. 2 Flow of the queuing system at the fast-food restaurant

104 Using Simulation to Model Queuing Problem … 1059

(i). Arrival time distribution: interarrival time can follow one of the following
distributions; Poisson distribution, a deterministic distribution or a general
distribution.
(ii). Service time distribution: service time can be constant, exponential or any
general distribution.
(iii). Service channels: system follows multi-line service channel model.
Customers can queue at any of the queue lines which served by 2 servers.
(iv). Calling population: maximum number of customers is infinite because once
customers are served, they leave the restaurant immediately.
(v). Queue discipline: customers follow a queue discipline of first-come,
first-served basis.
(vi). Customer behaviour: customers in the queue do not leave the queue
unemployed.
In the meantime, simulation can be defined as a process of building a model of a
system or a decision problem and experimenting with the model to obtain insight
into the system’s behaviour or to assist in solving the decision problem (Kelton
et al. 2007). In this regard, the ARENA Simulation Software is used to build the
model. The model for this research follows the characteristic of multi-server model
and the simulation model was developed using the create, process, decide and
dispose of modules of ARENA. The ARENA simulation model for the fast-food
restaurant is shown in Fig. 2.
Based on Fig. 3, there are two counters in the system. Thus, when the first
customer arrives at the system then he or she can go to any counter to place an order
and wait for the food they are ordered. Once the customer gets the food ordered, he
or she will leave the system. As for the second customer, he or she can go to the
next available counter. If both counters are busy, then the newer customers will
have to wait in line either at Counter 1 or Counter 2.

Fig. 3 Simulation model at fast-food restaurant in Seremban

1060 N. Amit and N. A. Ghazali

A fast-food restaurant in Seremban was selected as the study location as it is

convenient and easily accessible for the researchers. The data were obtained
through an interview with the restaurant manager and along with data collection
through observations. The data collection was held on Friday during busy working
hours, from 10.30 am to 2.30 pm. Waiting lines occur at a fast-food restaurant
during peak meal times where customers who cannot be served immediately have to
queue (wait) for service (Patel et al. 2012). The restaurant has 3 counters, but only 2
counters were operated during the data collection process. The capacity of staff at
each counter is one. The fast-food restaurant has two servers who serve only one
customer each time.
The data were obtained by observing and recording customers’ arrival and
departure time at the fast-food restaurant. Furthermore, the researchers also recor-
ded the queuing and service times. Based on the data collected, the number of
customer arrivals and departures, queuing time, service time and waiting time for
each customer were calculated. Then, the probability distributions of the customer
arrival time and the service times at counters 1 and 2 were computed using an input
analyzer. Input analyser is a standard component in the ARENA software used to
generate a probability distribution of variables.

3 Results and Discussion

The distribution of the waiting and service times for the processes in the fast-food
restaurant using the Input Analyzer tool is summarized in Table 1.
Table 2 summarizes the performance measures based on the simulation results
using ARENA at each counter in the restaurant. The average waiting time of
customers at Counter 1 and Counter 2 were 5.03 and 2.27 min, respectively, and
customers at Counter 1 waited for a longer time than the customers at Counter 2.

Table 1 Process distribution of the system

Process Distribution Expression
Customer’s arrival Weibull −0.5 + WEIB (2.97, 1.17)
Counter 1 service Lognormal −0.5 + LOGN (3.11, 1.78)
Counter 2 service Gamma −0.5 + GAMM (0.907, 3.42)

Table 2 Performance Counter

measure at Counter 1 and 2
Performance measure 1 2
Average waiting time 5.0282 2.2716
Average queue length 1.1104 0.44486
Number of customers 53 47
Utilization rate 68.63% 57.68%
104 Using Simulation to Model Queuing Problem … 1061

Table 3 Performance Performance measure Average

measure of the system
System queue time 3.7326
System total time 6.7638
Number of customers 100

For the simulation period, it was observed that 53 customers ordered their meals at
Counter 1 and 47 customers ordered their meals at Counter 2. The utilization rate
value is between 0 and 100%, where 100% indicates that the server is fully
occupied all the time, while 0% indicates that the server is idle. From Table 2, the
utilization rate of server at Counter 1 was 68.63% higher than the utilization rate of
server at Counter 2, which was 57.68%.
Table 3 shows the performance measure for the system at the restaurant. The
average queue time in the system was higher than the 3-min service policy of the
fast-food restaurant, which is 3.73 min. This suggests that the restaurant manage-
ment needs to take actions to reduce customers’ waiting time to adhere to the
restaurant’s policy. The time a customer spent in the system is 6.76 min.

4 Conclusion

The queuing theory is a mathematical model which is used to analyse how much
time customer has to wait in order to make the system become more efficient, make
it easier to serve and at the same time increase the number of users that can be
served (Amin et al. 2014). The queue theory comes in many roles, particularly
when many customers arrive at the same time where they can be served in a queue.
Thus, the ultimate objective of the analysis of the queueing systems is to understand
the behaviour of their underlying processes and meet the assumptions required by
standard analytical modelling approaches so that intelligent decisions can be made
in their management.
In the meantime, simulation is the art to imitate a real-world situation which can
represent a system or create the illusion of reality that incorporates time and
changes that occur over time (Suhadak et al. 2015). ARENA is an effective software
is based on a simple flowchart that presents the system as a logical network of
related activities (Amit et al. 2012). This paper introduced the basic concepts of
queuing models. The key operating characteristics of a system shown are the first,
the utilization rate, second, the average time spent waiting in the system and in the
queue, and third, the average number of customers in the system and in the queue.
Based on the result, it was found that the average waiting time of the customer at
Counter 1 is 5 min exceeded the 3-min service policy of the fast-food restaurant.
Future studies may try to extend this work by considering the new pickup counter is
suggested would reduce both service time and waiting time, thus providing more
efficiency as compared to the regular counter.
1062 N. Amit and N. A. Ghazali

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