The VBO grocery store has a checkout counter with a full-time cashier. Customers arrive randomly with an average rate of 20 per hour. The distribution of service time is exponential with an average of 2 minutes. Occasionally, this situation causes a long queue and customer complaints. Since there is no room for another cashier, the manager plans to hire another person to help pack the groceries and reduce the expected service time to 1.5 minutes, still with exponential distribution.  The manager wants the percentage of time when there are more than 2 customers at the cash register to be less than 25%. He also wants no more than 5% of customers to have to wait 5 minutes or more before starting service or 7 minutes or more before finishing service.   a) Use the formulas from the M/M/1 model to calculate L, Lq, W and Wq, π0, π1 and π2 of the current transaction. What is the probability that there are more than 2 customers at the cash register?   (b) Repeat (a) for the helper alternative.

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The VBO grocery store has a checkout counter with a full-time cashier. Customers arrive randomly with an average rate of 20 per hour. The distribution of service time is exponential with an average of 2 minutes. Occasionally, this situation causes a long queue and customer complaints. Since there is no room for another cashier, the manager plans to hire another person to help pack the groceries and reduce the expected service time to 1.5 minutes, still with exponential distribution.  The manager wants the percentage of time when there are more than 2 customers at the cash register to be less than 25%. He also wants no more than 5% of customers to have to wait 5 minutes or more before starting service or 7 minutes or more before finishing service.  
a) Use the formulas from the M/M/1 model to calculate L, Lq, W and Wq, π0, π1 and π2 of the current transaction. What is the probability that there are more than 2 customers at the cash register?  

(b) Repeat (a) for the helper alternative. 

 

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