Question: A bank with five tellers opens its doors at 9 AM and closes its doors at 5 PM, but it operates until all customers in the bank by 5 PM have been served. Assume that the interarrival times of customers are exponentially distributed with a mean of 1 min and that the service times of customers are exponentially distributed with a mean of 4.5 min. In the current configuration, each teller has a separate queue (see Figure 8.64). An arriving customer joins the shortest queue, choosing the shortest queue furthest to the left in case of ties.
The bank's management team is concerned with operating costs as well as the quality of service currently being provided to customers, and they are thinking about changing the system to a single queue. In the proposed system, all arriving customers would join a single queue. The first customer in the queue goes to the first available teller. Simulate 5 days of operation of the current and proposed systems and compare their expected performance.
