IE 535 – Computer Simulation 

Take Home Final Exam 
The Examination due date is May 9th, 2018 

Question 1:
SAMBA Bank has a branch office at KSU with a number of tellers serving customers in the lobby, a teller serving the
drive-in line, and a number of service managers serving customers with special requests. The lobby, drive-in, and
service managers each have a separate single queue. Customers may join either of the queues (the lobby queue, the
drive-in queue, or the service managers’ queue). SAMAB is interested in performance evaluation of their customer
service operations.

 What are the random components in the system and their parameters?

 What performance measures would you recommend SAMBA to consider?

 What data would you collect and why?

Question 2:
Supermarket customers load their carts with goods totaling between $5 and $200, uniformly (and continuously)
distributed; call this the raw order amount. Assume that customers purchase independently of each other. At checkout,
63% of customers have a loyalty card that gives them 4% off their raw order amount. Also at checkout, 18% of
customers have coupons that give them 7% off their raw order amount. These two discounts occur independently of
each other, and a given customer could have one or the other of them, both of them, or neither of them, to get to their
net order amount (what they actually pay). Construct a spreadsheet simulation to simulate 100 customers and collect
statistics on the net order amount; these statistics should include the average, standard deviation, minimum,
maximum, and a histogram to describe the distribution of the net order amounts between $0 and $200. (HINT: to
decide whether a customer gets a loyalty discount, explore the Excel IF function with the first argument’s being a
random number distributed uniformly between 0 and 1; do similarly to decide on a coupon discount.)

Question 2:
I. Consider random variables and with a joint , given in the following table.

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 IE 535 – Computer Simulation 

Take Home Final Exam 
The Examination due date is May 9th, 2018 

a) Compute and , namely, the marginal pmf of and .

b) Compute the mean, variance, and squared coefficient of variation of .

c) Are and independent?

d) Compute the conditional expectations | 1 and | 1.

e) Compute the conditional expectation 2 | 1, 2.

II. Derive a formula for generating variates from the 2, 0.5 distribution, and then apply it to obtain two

samples: using 0.5, and using 0.75.

Question 3:
Five identical machines operate independently in a small shop. Each machine is up (i.e., works) for between 7 and 10
hours (uniformly distributed) and then breaks down. There are two repair technicians available, and it takes one
technician between 1 and 4 hours (uniformly distributed) to fix a machine; only one technician can be assigned to
work on a broken machine even if the other technician is idle. If more than two machines are broken down at a given
time, they form a (virtual) FIFO “repair” queue and wait for the first available technician. A technician works on a
broken machine until it is fixed, regardless of what else is happening in the system. All uptimes and downtimes are
independent of each other. Starting with all machines at the beginning of an “up” time, simulate this for 160 hours
and observe the time-average number of machines that are down (in repair or in queue for repair), as well as the
utilization of the repair technicians as a group; put your results in a Text box in your model. Animate the machines
when they’re either undergoing repair or in queue for a repair technician, and plot the total number of machines down
(in repair plus in queue) over time. (HINT: Think of the machines as “customers” and the repair technicians as
“servers” and note that there are always five machines floating around in the model and they never leave.)

Question 4:
Hungry’s Fine Fast Foods is interested in looking at their staffing for the lunch rush, running from 10 AM to 2 PM.
People arrive as walk-ins, by car, or on a (roughly) scheduled bus, as follows:

 Walk-ins—one at a time, inter-arrivals are exponential with mean 3 minutes; the first walk-in occurs

3 minutes past 10 AM.

 By car—with 1, 2, 3, or 4 people to a car with respective probabilities 0.2, 0.3, 0.3, and 0.2; inter-arrivals

distributed as exponential with mean 5 minutes; the first car arrives 5 minutes past 10 AM.

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 IE 535 – Computer Simulation 

Take Home Final Exam 
The Examination due date is May 9th, 2018 

 A single bus arrives every day sometime between 11 AM and 1 PM (arrival time distributed uniformly over

this period). The number of people on the bus varies from day to day, but it appears to follow a Poisson

distribution with a mean of 30 people.

Once people arrive, either alone or in a group from any source, they operate independently regardless of their source.
The first stop is with one of the servers at the order/payment counter, where ordering takes 1, 2, 4 minutes and
payment then takes 1, 2, 3 minutes; these two operations are sequential, first order-taking then payment, by
the same server for a given customer. The next stop is to pick up the food ordered, which takes an amount of time
distributed uniformly between 30 seconds and 2 minutes. Then each customer goes to the dining room, which has 30
seats (people are willing to sit anywhere, not necessarily with their group), and partakes of the sublime victuals, taking
an enjoyable 11, 20, 31 minutes. After that, the customer walks fulfilled to the door and leaves. Queueing at
each of the three “service” stations (order/pay, pickup food, and dining room) is allowed, with FIFO discipline. There
is a travel time of 30 seconds from each station to all but the exit door—entry to order/pay, order/pay to pick-
up food, and pickup food to dining. After eating, people move more slowly, so the travel time from the dining room
to the exit is 1 minute.

The servers at both order/pay and pickup food have a single break that they “share” on a rotating basis. More
specifically, at 10:50, 11:50, 12:50, and 1:50, one server from each station goes on a 10-minute break; if the person due
to go on break at a station is busy at break time, he or she finishes serving the customer but still has to be back at the
top of the hour (so the break could be a little shorter than 10 minutes).

Staffing is the main issue facing Hungry’s. Currently, there are six servers at the order/pay station and two at the pickup
food station throughout the 4-hour period. Since they know that the bus arrives sometime during the middle two
hours, they’re considering a variable staffing plan that, for the first and last hour would have three at order/pay and
one at pickup food, and for the middle two hours would have nine at order/pay and three at pickup food (note that
the total number of person-hours on the payroll is the same, 32, under either the current staffing plan or the alternate
plan, so the payroll cost is the same). What’s your advice?

In terms of output, observe the average and maximum length of each queue, the average and maximum time in each
queue, and the total number of customers completely served and out the door. Make plots of the queues to get into
order/pay, pickup food, and the dining room. Animate all queues, resources, and movements between stations. Pick
from a . picture library a humanoid picture for the entities (different for each arrival source), and make an
appropriate change to their appearance after they’ve finished eating and leave the dining room. Also, while you won’t
be able to animate the individual servers or seats in the dining room, pick reasonable pictures for them as well.

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 IE 535 – Computer Simulation 

Take Home Final Exam 
The Examination due date is May 9th, 2018 

Question 5:
Consider the following data for the monthly number of stoppages (due to failures or any other reason) in the assembly
line of an automotive assembly plant.

a) Apply the chi-square test to the sample data of stoppages to test the hypothesis that the underlying

distribution is Poisson at significance level 0.05.

b) Using Arena's Input Analyzer, find the best fit to the data. For what range of significance levels can

the fit be accepted?

Question 6:
A production line consists of two workstations in series: the first performs a filling process and the second performs a
capping process. Both workstations have unlimited buffer space. A job in the real-life system is a batch of 10 containers
to be filled and capped. However, to simplify modeling, here each batch will be treated as a single entity. Job inter-
arrival times at the first workstation are exponentially distributed with mean 3.125 minutes. Upon completion of
the filling process, the job joins the buffer of the capping process. Job filling-time distributions are 1, 3, 5
minutes, while capping takes a fixed time of 3 minutes. Jobs depart from the system after the capping process is
complete. Simulate the system for 10,000 minutes, and estimate the following statistics:

a) Average job delay in each workstation buffer.

b) Utilization of each workstation.

c) Using the Arena Output Analyzer and the batch means method, estimate from a single replication the 95%

confidence interval for the average job system time.

d) Compute a correlogram for the waiting times in the buffer of the first workstation for the individual waiting

times.

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 IE 535 – Computer Simulation 

Take Home Final Exam 
The Examination due date is May 9th, 2018 

e) Compute a correlogram for the waiting times in the buffer of the first workstation for the batched waiting

times (choose an appropriate batch size).

f) Use the Arena Process Analyzer to study the impact of capping time on the mean job flow time by stepping

the capping time from 1 minutes to 3 minutes in increments of 0.5 minutes.

Question 7:
A part arrives every ten minutes to a system having three workstations (A, B, and C), where each workstation has a
single machine; the first part arrives at time 0. There are four part types, each with equal probability of arriving. The
process plans for the four part types are given below. The entries for the process times are the parameters for a
triangular distribution (in minutes).

a) Assume that the transfer time between arrival and the first station, between all stations, and between the last

station and the system exit is three minutes. Use the Sequence feature to direct the parts through the system

and to assign the processing times at each station. Use the Sets feature to collect cycle times (total times in

system) for each of the part types separately. Animate your model (including the part transfers), run the

simulation for 10,000 minutes, and collect statistics on the average part cycle time.

b) Change your model (the model you’ve built in part a) to include fork trucks to transport the parts between

stations. Assume that there are two fork trucks that each travel at 85 feet per minute. Loading or unloading

a part by the fork truck requires 0.25 minute. The distance between stations is given (in feet) in the

following table; note that the distances are, in general, directional:

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 IE 535 – Computer Simulation 

Take Home Final Exam 
The Examination due date is May 9th, 2018 

Run your simulation for 100,000 minutes (you may want to turn off the animation via the

command after confirming that things are working

properly) and record the part cycle times. Assume that fork trucks remain at the station where they

unloaded the last part if no other request is pending. If both fork trucks are available, assume that the

closest one is selected.

c) Change your model (the model you’ve built in part a) to use non-accumulating conveyors to transfer the

parts between stations. Assume that there is a single conveyor that starts at the arrive area and continues to

the exit area: Arrive – WS A – WS B – WS C – Exit. Assume that the distances between all adjacent stations

on the conveyor are 100 feet. Further assume that the cells of the conveyor are 2 feet and that each part

requires 4 feet of conveyor space. Load and unload times are each 0.25 minute. The conveyor speed is 20

feet per minute. Run your simulation for 100,000 minutes and record the part cycle times.

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 IE 535 – Computer Simulation 

Take Home Final Exam 
The Examination due date is May 9th, 2018 

Report Format for Problems Modeled with Arena

Reports Format for Arena problems should follow the following format:

PROBLEM STATEMENT (in your own words) including objectives. This section should be understandable by

someone who is not familiar with Arena, and hence you should minimize the amount of technical details relating to

the problem. Any assumptions about the situation should be listed. A diagram might be worthwhile in this section.

MODEL DESCRIPTION. This section reviews the techniques that you used to model the situation and lists all

technical modeling assumptions. This section should include the following:

a. NETWORK DIAGRAM (as a figure) and explanation.

b. Arena VARIABLES used in the model (list the variable name, its definition, its initial condition, etc. in

columns).

c. FILE DESCRIPTIONS. This section will list all the files (e.g., a file associated with a queue) used in the

program along with the file number and usage.

PRESENTATION OF RESULTS. The results which are relevant to the objectives stated in Section 1 should be

presented here. This should not be simply the Arena output report. The important results from the simulation

should be presented in tables, graphs, pie diagrams, etc.

ANALYSIS OF RESULTS. This section should reflect the fact that after the simulation model was coded and

debugged, time was spent thinking about the output from the model. You should do whatever quantitative work

(e.g., hypothesis testing) is appropriate.

CONCLUSIONS. As with Section 1, this section should be readable by a non-technical person. It should state the

conclusions drawn from you study.

APPENDIX; Arena INPUT STATEMENTS AND OUTPUT REPORT. This appendix to the report contains the

INPUT STATEMENTS and OUTPUT REPORT cut to page size.

Please start as early as possible on this on developing your model. Code should be written as early as possible that will
allow enough to debug the program and write up a report. Make sure to leave time to proofread your report. Points
will be deducted for spelling and grammatical errors.

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