At an airline ticket counter, the current practice is to allow queues to form in front of each ticket agent. Time between arrivals to the agents is exponentially distributed with a mean of 5 minutes.Customers join the shortest queue at the time of their arrival. The service time for the ticket agents is uniformly distributed between 1 and 10 minutes.

Simulate this model and determine the number of agents needed to achieve an average waiting time of 5 minutes or less. This will require an iterative approach in which you run the model with one server, then with two servers, three servers and so on.

The airline has decided to change the queue procedure. Rather than a line for each ticket agent, a single line will be used and customers will be routed to the next available ticket agent. Modify the simulation to accommodate this change. Run the simulation and determine the number of agents needed to achieve an average waiting time of 5 minutes.

Compare the two systems in terms of number of agents needed to achieve the average waiting waiting time of 5 minutes.