Modeling a carwash

Simulation and Modeling (CSCI 3010U)

Faisal Qureshi

Faculty of Science, Ontario Tech University

http://vclab.science.ontariotechu.ca

Discuss in class


You are approached by a client who is thinking of setting up a carwash in the city of Oshawa. The client needs to decide how many carwash stations they need to install at this shop in order to turn a handsome profit.

A principled way to answer this question is to set up a Discrete Event Systems simulation that models the carwash. The simulation will allow you to capture the wait times under different regimes (i.e. different number of wash stations, different types of wash stations, etc.). You can take this information to the client to decide how many carwash stations are needed for “acceptable” wait times. That in turn can be used to decide whether or not setting up this carwash is a sound business decision. If the wait times are too long, the customers will turn away from this carwash. On the flip side, it is very costly to setup a carwash stations; therefore, it is important to install the smallest number of carwash stations initially. As a point of reference the average wait times at a nearby carwash is currently 30 minutes.

You’ll use the data provided below to setup this simulation.

Data

The following data represents the number of cars arriving during each 1 hour interval.

9 12 21  7 22 20 10 13 13 15 17 16 11 14 14 14 13 17 14 18  7 17 12 13 16 17 14 21 13 12 14 19 11 18 14 18  9 14 17 23 13 15 17 17 16 15 21 18 17 14 19 17 14 14 23 12 17 18 19 16 16 14 20 12 14 11 16 20 22 24 11 15 8 12  7 18 10 14 11 11 17 17 11 18 17 15 16 18  9 12  7 22  6  6 11 14 8 18 15 10

The following data represents recorded wash times in minutes.

12 13 9 8 13 12 14 11 11 14 12 7 8 9 11 12 7 14 12 9 8 10 11 14 11 13 12 12 14 13 11 8 12 12 11 14 12 11 11 10 12 8 13 11 11 8 11 13 10 11 10 9 11 9 11 12 12 14 12 7 14 10 7 12 13 12 11 10 14 12 12 9 9 8 11 11 7 7 8 10 9 11 10 8 13 11 12 9 10 9 10 7 10 13 12 13 13 11 10 9

Code

You can use the starter code available at http://csundergrad.science.uoit.ca/courses/sim-and-modeling-notes/code/des/des-carwash.html. The notebook is available here.

Submission

Nothing to submit. Show your work to the instructor.