Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

Assignment 3
10 May 2023

Module code and subject name: BON 410 – Operations Research

Lecturer and Examiner: Professor VSS Yadavalli (University of Pretoria)

Instructions:

• Answer ALL the questions.

• Please note that all questions do not carry the same marks.
• This paper has 4 questions along with instructions
• Intermediate steps are expected to be shown for each problem. You
may receive marks for the correct method used, not for the correct
answer only.
• There are Graduate Attributes (GA), GA1 and GA 2, from ECSA evaluated
at developmental level.
• No programmable calculator can be used.
• You need to submit the solutions on clickUP. The clickUP will be opened at
10h00 and close strictly by 22h00 on 10 May 2023.

Marks: 50

1
Question 1 [ 19 ]
A tax consulting firm has four service counters in its office to receive people who have problems and
complaints about their income, wealth and sales taxes. The number of arrivals follow a Poisson
distribution with an average arrival rate of 80 persons in 8-hour service day. Each tax adviser spends an
irregular amount of time servicing the arrivals which have been found to have an exponential distribution.
The average service time is 20 minutes per person. Calculate, (i) the average number of customers in the
system, (ii) average number of customers waiting to be serviced, (iii) average time a customer spends in
the system, (iv) average waiting time for a customer, (v) the probability that a customer has to wait before
he gets service. For what percentage of time would a counter be idle on an average?

Question 2 [ 9 ]
Cars arrive at a Guest house with a mean arrival rate of 24 cars per hour and the service rate of cars is 20
cars per hour. The number of arrivals and services follow a Poisson distribution. The maximum number
of parking spaces is 6. Find the average number of cars in the queue and waiting time in the system.

Question 3 [ 14 ]
A small store wants to improve its service facilities in terms of its waiting time of its customers. The
arrivals of customers follow a Poisson distribution with an average rate of 20 customers per hour.
Justify whether it is better to get service at a single service facility with a mean service rate of 22
customers per hour or at one of two service facilities, with a mean service rate of 11 customers per hour
for each service facility?
Question 4 [ 8 ]
Determine the optimum strategies for each player A (maximising) and B minimising), and the value of
the game in the following game:

Player B
B1 B2 B3 B4 B5

A1 6 5 4 6 7

Player A

A2 2 4 8 3 8

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