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Operations Research Models and Methods
 
Problems Section
Problems for Queuing Models
 - Registration

A small college has a registration process that has the following steps:

  • A student goes to an advisor to formulate a schedule. Average time 8 minutes.
  • The student goes to the class table where the availability of the classes are ascertained. Average time 12 minutes.
  • The student goes to the cashier to pay tuition and fees. Average time 3 minutes.

Students arrive at this system at the rate of 20 per hour. At each station, students wait in a first come-first served queue. Assuming the arrival and service processes are Poisson, we use queuing analysis to find the following results. The results were found using the minimum number of servers for each station.

Queue Station
Advisors
Classes
Cashier
Number of Channels
Mean Time in System (hrs.)
0.452
0.311
0.067

a. Fill in the row describing the minimum number of channels (servers).

b. What is the average time a student spends in the registration process?

c. What is the average number of students in the process?

d. What proportion of the total time does a student spend waiting in a queue on the average?

e. Say you could add another channel to one of the stations in the registration process. To which station would you add the channel?


  
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