HELP ME WITH THIS SIMULATION QUESTION PLEASE!!

Simulation: Birthday Party

Now that the pandemic is almost over, your friend decides to throw a fun and big birthday party for herself (this is an outdoor party; alcoholic drinks are allowed though), but she is not exactly sure how many people will be attending. She needs to order food, drinks and some other party supplies and would like to estimate her costs. She has several scenarios in mind. Help her to find out which scenario is going to be less costly for her under some other conditions that you will be informed about later. The main problem that she is facing is that her time is very tight (last-minute planning!), and she must order/purchase the party supplies before she gets her friends RSVP.

She has a guest list of 25 people that she plans to invite. 10 of these people are her close friends and are fine with attending a big outdoor party despite the pandemic situation, so the chance that each of them will show up is 85%. 5 of the remaining 15 people are not her close friends, but their social media shows some evidence of recent partying, and based on this observation, your friend believes these 5 people will show up with a chance of 70%. Another group of 5 who are her close friends have been quite conservative during the pandemic, and she believes that they will not show up with a chance of 75%. She has no idea about the preferences of the remaining 4 people (why 4 and not 5? because that one remaining person is you, and you are going!), so she is going to assume they will join with a 50% chance.

Your friend is considering allowing the guests to bring a few people with them to the party (e.g., siblings, cousins, friends, partners, etc.), only if they are between 19 to 35 years old! If she allows them to bring only one person, the chance that each guest will show up with an additional person is 50%. If she allows for two additional guests, each will bring one person with a chance of 35%, and two people with a chance of 15%. If she allows three, the probabilities for 1,2 and 3 people will be 30%, 13% and 7% respectively. She is not considering allowing 4 additional guests for anyone other than yourself, and you can input the number of your guests that you will bring with certainty.

She has two meal plans in mind:1) pizza from Dominos, and 2) sandwiches from Subway She believes one large pizza (pepperoni or veggie) should be enough for three people on average, and for the second plan, a 6-inch cold Subway sandwich (whichever is cheaper) is needed for each guest. She asked you to estimate per person meal costs.

She has two drink plans in mind: 1) cocktails (she left it for you to decide what liqueur and what cocktail(s)), wine and cheese 2) beer, champaign and vodka. She has no idea what the cost per person for each of these plans would be, so she left this for you to estimate as well (time to reconsider your friendship?).

She has done one thing herself though: she is going to buy the cake, candles, balloons, some snacks, and soft drinks once you tell her the estimated number of guests. She is going to rent a sound system and a disco ball (seriously?) as well, which dont depend on the number of the guests.

Make a simulation model in Excel and let her know which plan she should go with, knowing that she prefers to have at least 30 guests in total: how many people should she allow her guests to bring to the party, and what meal plan and drink plan should she choose. Also, let her know about the average age of the guests in each scenario as well, since she needs to prepare some playlists (assume discrete uniform distribution for the ages, even the guests themselves). If none of the scenarios in your simulation suggest 30 guests or more, go with the highest number, and to comfort your friend, either give her some hope by telling her maybe the probabilities she believes are incorrect and more people will show up, or bring up the pandemic concerns, so she doesnt get upset or disappointed after all. Or...you can take as many people with you as you are allowed (4!!) to make her happy!

If you need to make any assumptions, feel free to do so, but list them explicitly. Your age, number of guests, their ages or any other information about you are assumed to be certain and constant (nothing is random about you), but you dont need to provide real values! Try to come up with some good food/drink cost estimates, but you dont need to spend too much time on the cost estimation as the purpose of this assignment is to make you practice some simulation modeling.

Have fun simulating!!