You have a physician seeing patients in the ER. Patients arrive at a rate of 2 per hour. The average service time per patient is 20 minutes.

a. To proceed with your analysis, what assumptions do you need to make about both arrival and service time distributions?

b. What is the average number of patients in the ER?

c. What is the average time that a patient spends from the time they enter the ER to the time they leave?

d. The waiting area is separate from the examining/treatment room. How many chairs should there be in the waiting area to reduce the probability that someone will have no chair less than 0.05

e. Suppose a physician costs $300 per hour. If the $100 per hour waiting penalty is in effect, does it pay to add the second physician? You must compare the situation when you have one physician with the situation when you have two.

f. Which gives you shorter waits overall, one ER with two physicians or two separate ER's with one physician in each one, each serving half as many patients on the average?