MH2401

Algorithms & Computing III Individual Project: Simulating Queues

AY 2013/14 S1

A. Aim. The aim of this project is to determine, via simulations, a stang plan so that the proportion of customers waiting beyond a prescribed time is kept within certain guidelines. B. Instructions. 1. You must submit your report for this project by 12 noon on 14th October, Monday. 2. Your submission will be checked for plagiarism. All parties found involved in plagiarism will be severely dealt with. These include (a) students who copy from another students work or other sources; (b) students who allow their works to be copied. 3. Your submission must be in one PDF le, with all text selectable. In other words, when I use the Select Tool to select all the text in the PDF le, I should be able to copy all the text in the le, except text in plots produced by MATLAB and in mathematical formulas produced by short LaTeX codes. The reason for this is to allow for successful operation of the plagiarism checker. Failure to do so will result in a penalty. 4. Your report will be graded on the following criteria. (a) Organization: Is the report presented in a well-organized and logical manner? (b) Clarity: Are the statements clear and well-structured? (c) Understanding: Does the report demonstrate complete understanding of the problem and related mathematical concepts? (d) Computation: Does the report exhibit appropriate use of computational tools?

C. The Problem. To reduce operating costs, Air Math seeks to sta its main telephone sales reservation oce eciently while providing convenient service to its customers. Reservation oce hours are from 0700hrs till 2200hrs. Three shifts start on the hour at 0700hrs, 1200hrs and 1700hrs. Each shift is 5 hours long. Traditionally, stang needs are estimated by forecasting future telephone calls based on historical increase in business. The increase in sta numbers is then calculated based on the projected average increase in telephone calls divided by the average number of calls an operator can handle. Because the calculations are based on averages, the additional number of hired sta does not take into account the uctuations in demand during the day. In particular, long waiting time for service during peak business hours has resulted in both customer complaints and lost business. The problem deals with the determination of a plan that strikes a balance between the number of hired operators and customer needs. The plan must be responsive to the uctuations in demand during business hours. C.1. The mathematical model. When a customer calls the sales reservation oce, the customer is immediately connected with an available operator. If all operators are busy, then the customer is placed on hold in a rst-in-rst-out queue. Once an operator is done with a customer, the operator is immediately connected with the rst customer (if any) in this queue. The sales reservation oce can thus be modelled by a queueing model with a single queue and multiple servers. C.2. Arrival and service rates. An arrival refers to the event that a customer makes a call to the sales reservation oce. Arrivals are random events. A service refers to the event that an operator attends to a customer. The service time (i.e., length of service) is a random variable. Observations on arrivals and service times in this queueing model as summarized below. 1. Arrivals exhibit substantial variations by time of day but are consistent from one working day to another. 2. Service time distribution appears to be stationary over time. 3. The distribution of arrivals per minute over half-hour periods is Poisson albeit with dierent means (see Table 1). 4. The distribution of service time is exponential with mean 3.5 minutes. C.3. The Poisson and the exponential distributions. The Poisson distribution is a discrete distribution with probability density given by 1 x e if x {0, 1, 2, . . . }, P (X = x) = x! 0 otherwise,

where is a positive real parameter. The parameter is both the expected value and variance of the Poisson variable X . The Poisson distribution can be applied to systems with a large number of possible events (such as customer calls in a period), each of which is rare (i.e., in a very short period of time, the number of occurrences is at most 1). The time interval between consecutive occurrences of Poisson events is an exponentially distributed random variable with the same parameter .

Period Mean

0700 0730 0800 0830 0900 0930 1000 1030 1100 1130 | | | | | | | | | | 0730 0800 0830 0900 0930 1000 1030 1100 1130 1200 5 9 10 11 12 15 18 19 20 20

1200 1230 1300 1330 1400 1430 1500 1530 1600 1630 Period | | | | | | | | | | 1230 1300 1330 1400 1430 1500 1530 1600 1630 1700 Mean 20 20 19 18 17 15 12 11 10 10 1700 1730 1800 1830 1900 1930 2000 2030 2100 2130 | | | | | | | | | | 1730 1800 1830 1900 1930 2000 2030 2100 2130 2200 Mean 10 9 9 9 7 7 5 5 3 3 Table 1. Average number of calls per minute computed over 30-minute periods from 0700hrs to 2200hrs. Period The exponential distribution is a continuous distribution with cumulative density given by 1 ex if x 0, P {X x} = 0 otherwise,

where is a positive real parameter. The expected value of the exponential variable X is 1/ and its variance is 1/2 . An exponential variable X with parameter can be generated from a uniformly distributed random variable U Unif[0, 1] via ln U X= . C.4. The goal. Currently, each shift is manned, respectively, by 70, 75 and 30 operators. A recent study shows that there is signicant number of lost calls due to unreasonably long waiting time. To guard against these lost calls, the management has set the goal that at least 90% of the calls should be answered within 20 seconds. C.5. Your tasks. You are tasked to perform simulations of the current situation as follows. For each shift, 1. generate a random sequence of arrivals so that the distribution of the number of arrivals in each 30-minute period is Poisson with mean as given in Table 1; 2. for each arrival, generate a random service time that is exponentially distributed with mean 3.5 minutes; and 3. determine the number of arrivals with waiting times over 20 seconds. A shift is deemed to meet the managements goal if, over the period of one year (which has 260 working days), at most 10% of the arrivals has waiting times over 20 seconds. From your simulations, you are to determine which (if any) of the shifts needs more operators to meet the managements goal, and how many more operators are needed (to the nearest 5 operators).