Every morning at 9:30am, the manager of a fast-food restaurant determines how many hamburgers to pre-make so they are ready to be immediately given to customers at lunchtime. If not enough are pre-made, customers will have to wait a long time in line, and might go to the competing fast-food restaurant next door instead. If too many are pre-made, some will spoil before they can be used.

The manager has come up with the following incorrect idea:

GIVEN the past fraction of days that hamburgers were ordered at lunch, the past overall distributions of (a) arrival rates of customers, (b) the time it takes to give a customer a pre-made hamburger, (c) the time it takes to make and give the customer a newly-made hamburger, (d) customers leaving because of lines, and (e) hamburger spoilage, USE a simulation model TO find the best tradeoff between the expected number of customers served each day and the cost of spoiled hamburgers.

Select all of the possible paths below that could reasonably lead to a good solution.

a. Predict the lunchtime demand for each day. Estimate the wait time for each customer. The find the best tradeoff between decreased wait time and the time it takes to pre-make some food.

b. Predict the lunchtime demand for each day. Estimate the probability of customers leaving because the line is too long, based on demand and service rates. Then find the best tradeoff between opportunity cost of lost customers and cost of spoiled food

c. Predict the lunchtime demand for each day. Find the best tradeoff between the cost of closest customers and the cost of spoiled food, as a function of the probability customers will leave for different line lengths. Then, based on an expert estimate of the probability customers will leave for different line lengths, determine the best number of hamburgers to premake.