Please read the description of the Little’s law simulation on http://archive.ite.journal.informs.org/Vol7No1/DobsonShumsky/little.php
and try to answer the posed questions, after running the simulation. I’d need a brief (one – two para) legible submission from you in class next Thursday:
A series of stick-figures enter a room and stay in the room for a random length of time. While in the room, the stick figures wander and complete whimsical ‘tasks’ (some break apart and re-assemble, some spin, some Psy-dance, and some drink coffee).
You control the mean and CVs (coeff. of variation = normalized measure of dispersion of a prob distb. = std. deviation/mean) of the inter-arrival times and the time-of-stay.
As the stick figures leave, they turn green and a counter that indicates their total time in the room is frozen. The simulation plots running averages of three quantities: (i) the actual ‘inventory’ of people in the room (I), (ii) the product of the actual rate of arrivals (flow rate = R), and the actual time spent in the room (T), and (iii) the expected value of these quantities according to Little’s Law, calculated from the mean values chosen by you.
Little’s Law (Little, 1961) states that for a stable system,
Average inventory (I) = Average throughput(R or flow rate) * Average time in system (T or flow time).
1) Why do you see a difference between the inventory computed in ‘i’, ‘ii’ and ‘iii’, respectively ?
2) Can Little’s law be wrong? Why or why not?
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