Burger Dome is a fast-food restaurant currently appraising its customer service. In its current operation, an employee takes a customer’s order, tabulates the cost, receives payment from the customer, and then fills the order. Once the customer’s order is filled, the employee takes the order of the next customer waiting for service. Assume that time between each customer’s arrival is an exponential random variable with a mean of 1.35 minutes. Assume that the time for the employee to complete the customer’s service is an exponential random variable with mean of 1 minute. Use the Burgerdome file to complete a simulation model for the waiting line at Burger Dome for a 14-hour workday.
You will need to use native Excel functionality to solve this problem because the educational version of ASP has a limit of 100 random variables. Recall the formula 5LN(RAND())*(-m) generates a value for an exponential random variable with mean m. Using the summary statistics gathered at the bottom of the spreadsheet model, answer the following questions.
a. What is the average wait time experienced by a customer?
b. What is the longest wait time experienced by a customer?
c. What is the probability that a customer waits more than 2 minutes?
d. Create a histogram depicting the wait time distribution.
e. By pressing the F9 key to generate a new set of simulation trials, one can observe the variability in the summary statistics from simulation to simulation. Typically, this variability can be reduced by increasing the number of trials. Why is this approach not appropriate for this problem?