BACKGROUND:

Consider a web store where you can buy all types of memory cards. Customers order a memory card via the webpage www.allmemorycards.ca. A new customers request for a memory card arrives according to a Poisson process with an average inter-arrival time of 11 minutes. Immediately the memory card is moved from the storage area to the packaging and inspection area such that the customers request can be fulfilled as quickly as possible.

First, the memory card is packaged automatically on a machine, which takes exactly 8 minutes. The machine is operational for 24 hours per day. Sometimes a memory card gets stuck in the packaging machine, which needs to be fixed before packaging can continue. This happens randomly, but we are not able to fit a distribution on the malfunction frequency. We only know that a failure occurs most likely after 16 memory cards have been packed, with a minimum of 10 memory cards and a maximum of 40 cards. Once the machine breaks down, there is a repair man available on site immediately. It takes on average 20 minutes (normally distributed with a standard deviation of 5 minutes) to get the machine running again.

In the next stage, an employee performs a quality check and attaches a label with the address of the customer to the package. There are three different employees who perform this task sequentially in shifts of 8 hours each, where employee 1 has the night shift (from 12 AM to 8 AM), employee 2 is scheduled to work from 8 AM to 4 PM and employee 3 has the evening shift (from 4 PM to 12 AM). There is an agreement between these three employees that the memory cards that have been packed during the shift of an employee are also labelled and checked by this employee during the same shift. This means that each employee does not start his/her shift with any work in progress and an employee can only leave when there is no work in progress that has been created during his/her shift (i.e., when a shift ends this employee finishes his/her WIP while new packages are sent to the newly started employee). Each employee has its own speed to process the packages. Employee 1 always needs 8 minutes to perform the quality check and put a label on the package, whereas the time required by employee 2 and 3 follows a lognormal distribution with an average of 7 minutes. However, the standard deviation is 2 minutes for employee 2 and 4 minutes for employee 3.

Regularly (15% of the packages) an error is observed at the quality check. If an error is observed, then the memory card must be taken out of the package and returned to the packaging machine. It takes an employee (a different person than the person doing the quality check) exactly 2 minutes to remove a memory card from the package. This employee who is responsible for removing packages is only available from 8 AM to 12 PM and from 1 PM to 5 PM. When this employee leaves the workstation (either at 12 PM or 5 PM), (s)he will finish only the job that was already started and any work in the queue will remain for when (s)he returns. She starts and resumes her shift every day at 8 AM and 1 PM sharp. If the quality check is positive (the other 85%), then the packaged memory card can be transhipped to the customer by mail.

QUESTION:

Create a model in Arena. Set up the model to run for 5 days, starting at 8:00 AM. Make the animation as realistic as possible.

Use adequate icons for the packaging machine (different when under repair) and the different employees (different when unavailable). Make sure that the memory card that is processed is visible on the machine.

Use different icons for the memory card and the package.

Use a different colour for packages that passed (green) or failed (red) the quality check.

Show in the animation whether the unpacking employee is available or not.

Add information/visuals to the screen with the variable statistics, such that you can see the number of entities in each queue (i.e., queue length) during the simulation.

You dont have to incorporate the overtime for the employees