QUEUING THEORY ASSIGNMENT

QUESTIN ONE
Cars arrive at a toll gate on a highway according to a Poisson distribution with a mean
rate of 90 miles per hour. The times for passing through the gate are exponentially
distributed with mean 38 seconds, and drivers complain of the long waiting time.
Transportation authorities are willing to decrease the passing time through the gate to
30 seconds by introducing new automatic devices, but this can be justified only if
under the old system the average number of waiting cars exceeds five. In addition, the
percentage of gate’s idle time under the new system should not exceed 10%. Use
queuing theory to justify the installation of new device (10 marks)

QUESTIN TWO
a) Printer jobs are created in a computing system according to a Poisson distribution
with a mean of 40 jobs per hour. Average print times are 65 seconds. Users
complain of long delays in receiving their printouts, but the computing lab
director will be willing to purchase a faster printer (twice as fast as the present one)
only if it can be demonstrated that the current average queue length is four (or
more) jobs, and only if the new printer would be idle for at most 20% of the time.

Required:

Will the lab director be able to justify the acquisition of the new printer? Answer this
question by doing various calculations to justify your answer. (10 marks).

QUESTION THREE
a) A branch office of a large engineering firm has one on-line terminal that is
connected to a central computer system during the normal eight-hour working day.
Engineers, who work throughout the city, drive to the branch office to use the
terminal to make routine calculations. Statistics collected over a period of time
indicate that the arrival pattern of people at the branch office to use the terminal
has a Poisson (random) distribution, with a mean of 10 people coming to use the
terminal each day. The distribution of time spent by an engineer at a terminal is
exponential, with a mean of 30 minutes. The branch office receives complains
from the staff about the terminal service. It is reported that individuals often wait
over an hour to use the terminal queue time and it rarely takes less than an hour
and a half in the office to complete a few calculations. The manager is puzzled
because the statistics show that the terminal is in use only 5 hours out of 8, on the
average. This level of utilization would not seem to justify the acquisition of
another terminal.
Calculate the following:
i. Probability of a busy service channel (3 marks)
ii. The expected number of engineers in the terminal. (3 marks)
iii. The expected time an engineer spends in the office. (3 marks)
iv. The expected time an engineer spends in the terminal. (3 marks)
v. From the calculations above, is it justifiable to open a second terminal? (2
marks)