Question: Consider a local post - disaster relief center where the volunteers accept and organize different in - kind donations. After a disaster, they accept three
Consider a local postdisaster relief center where the volunteers accept and organize different inkind
donations. After a disaster, they accept three kinds of donations to be sent to the disaster area. The donors
can bring boxes that contain canned food, perishable food, or clothes. The interarrival times for canned
food donations are distributed with EXPO minutes, and the perishable food boxes have an interarrival
time with distribution EXPO minutes. Since clothes are easier to collect and store, boxes of cloth
donations are more frequent with an interarrival time distribution of EXPO minutes.
There are two processes at this center: accepting and sorting donations. Currently, there is one volunteer
working on accepting the donations and three more volunteers working on sorting the accepted donation
boxes. Accepting a donation lasts for UNIF minutes, and the accepting volunteer can work with one
donor at a time. The sorting time for boxes depends on the type of box. Canned food donations take
TRIA minutes to sort, and perishable food donations take UNIF minutes to sort. For cloth
donations, if the box contains only the samesize items, it takes TRIA minutes, and if there are
different sizes in the box, it takes TRIA minutes. of the cloth donations contain only samesized items.
The donations are processed according to a firstcomefirstout FIFO discipline in both the acceptance
queue and sorting queue normally. However, when a perishable food donation arrives, it is prioritized in
both acceptance and sorting to ensure food safety. Volunteers start working on the perishable food donation
immediately if they are idle and after finishing the current activity if they are already working on a box both
in the accepting and sorting processes
The management of this relief center wants to improve the operations and hired you to model the system
to conduct a simulation study and make some suggestions. Assume that the system is empty and all
resources are idle at time Assume that the first arrival for each donation occurs at time and donations
arrive one by one.
I. Model the system on ARENA and run the simulation for hours daily working time Report the
following. Make sure to include the time unit in your answers.
a Average waiting time for both queues in the system acceptance and sorting queues
b Utilization of volunteers in both processes.
c The average and maximum type spent in the system by each type of donation canned
food, perishable food, clothes
d If the maximum time for perishable foods is less than minutes, the relief center is
assumed to respect food safety rules. Are they ensuring food safety as the system is right
now?
e Number of donations processed per day.
II A new volunteer will start working at the relief center. The new volunteer can either help accept or
sort the donations, and will be trained accordingly. Once the volunteer receives the necessary
training, herhis service time will be the same as the existing volunteers. Based on the performance
metrics of interest, to which process should the new volunteer be assigned? Why? Discuss your
findings eg which change would improve which performance measure the most
Hint: To solve this question, you must try adding the new volunteer to the acceptance and sorting
processes in different model versions and run each model for hours.
can you make detailed arena flowchart of this model
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