ACOG has decided to provide buses to move visitors to the '96 Summer Olympics around the Olympics Village from the MARTA station. You have been hired to design a simulation to help them decide how to route the buses. The goal is to find a way to route the buses to minimize the average travel time between arrival at the MARTA station and arrival at the Venue of the visitor's choice.
- Visitors arrive via subway trains at the MARTA station on average every seven minutes (normal distribution, deviation of two minutes). Between 20 and 50 people arrive on each train (uniform distribution). It takes four to six minutes (uniform distribution) to load a bus. Only one bus can load at a time. (A bus can't load more people than are waiting at the MARTA station.)
- 50% of the visitors want to get to the walkway to the stadium, 30% want to go to the swimming venue, and 20% want to go to the boxing venue.
- Travel times between the positions are as follows:
|
From
|
To
|
Travel Time
|
| MARTA | Stadium Walkway | 5 minutes |
| MARTA | Boxing Venue | 5 minutes |
| Boxing Venue | Swimming Venue | 20 minutes |
| Swimming Venue | Stadium Walkway | 10 minutes |
- It takes two minutes to unload the bus. (We're not worrying right now about getting people from the Venues back to MARTA.)
- You have five buses which can each hold sixty people maximum.
You are welcome to route the buses anyway that you want. Some strategies to consider:
- All buses run a fixed route, perhaps Stadium Walkway to Swimming to Boxing and back to MARTA.
- Buses run a fixed route, but if no one wants to go on (e.g., bus empties), you turn it around.
- Some buses take the route one way (Stadium to Swimming to Boxing) while others reverse the route (Boxing to Swimming to Stadium).
- Some or all buses go to one and only one venue. It is reasonable to load up a bus that only goes to one venue with only the people that are going to that venue, i.e., if a bus is labelled with one venue, then people will figure out to only get on that bus if they are going to that venue. However, anything more complicated (e.g., fixed route, reverse route, goes to only two venues, etc.) is too complicated for the visitors to be smart about which bus to get on -- you have to take the visitors regardless of where they're going. For example, if you have one bus that goes only to Boxing, it's okay for you to load only those going to Boxing on that bus. But if you have another bus that goes to Swimming and the Stadium Walkway, you must load that bus with people going to Boxing as well.
You will need the Simulation package to complete this problem.