At the Millbrook High School cafeteria, students proceed along a series of stations in a single line: (1) get tray and utensils, (2) choose food, (3) select beverage, (4) pay. The school is concerned that students are taking too long to get their meal. The school has analyzed the capacities of each of the four steps in isolation and found there exists sufficient capacity at each resource in isolation. Which of the following is most likely to be causing the congestion? a. The bottleneck is probably at the last station because capacity is reduced the most when the bottleneck is at the end of the process. b. The implied utilization of the bottleneck is too low. c. Due to variability in processing times, both blocking and starving could be occurring. d. The process must be demand-constrained. e. The stations have similar utilizations.

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17 May, 16:56

At the Millbrook High School cafeteria, students proceed along a series of stations in a single line: (1) get tray and utensils, (2) choose food, (3) select beverage, (4) pay. The school is concerned that students are taking too long to get their meal. The school has analyzed the capacities of each of the four steps in isolation and found there exists sufficient capacity at each resource in isolation. Which of the following is most likely to be causing the congestion? a. The bottleneck is probably at the last station because capacity is reduced the most when the bottleneck is at the end of the process. b. The implied utilization of the bottleneck is too low. c. Due to variability in processing times, both blocking and starving could be occurring. d. The process must be demand-constrained. e. The stations have similar utilizations.

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Lydia Richardson · Answer 1

c. Due to variability in processing times, both blocking and starving could be occurring.

Explanation:

The problem here is that students take a long time to get their meal. It is understood that at each of the four stations there is ample space and so the most likely cause of delays is different processing times at four stations.

The problem of either blocking or starving arises when the processing times are very small or very large at one or two of the stations, which will significantly increase the cycle time of the operation.

hence, the correct option is c.