The arrival rate of customers fluctuates according to a daily pattern. Useful for modeling customer traffic with busy and slow periods.
Suggested Technique
1. Create an arrival connection from the customer entity to an activity or storage.
2. From the arrival’s properties sheet, select Daily Pattern as the arrival Type.
3. Click on the Define Pattern… button and create the pattern with the Daily Pattern dialog (see example below).
Example: Customers enter a retail store at a rate that varies throughout the day with high and low traffic periods. The first two hours the store is open, an average of 30 customers come into the store. At lunch time, an average of 85 customers come in. Then it slows down through the afternoon until about six o’clock.
TO DO: Create the above pattern for one day and then use the Copy day and Paste buttons to copy the pattern to other days. Or each day could vary as necessary. It is recommended that 5 to 10 replications be made of the simulated day.
If you want resources and activities to be available for only the period of time when arrivals are occurring, you should define a shift schedule corresponding to the period of the arrival pattern. To learn more, see Schedules—Shifts & Breaks.