Simulation Modeling & Analysis with Arena ®

A Business Student’s Primer

FIRST EDITION: JUNE 2005

SELECTED CONTENT FOR BU385

School of Business & Economics,

Wilfrid Laurier University Justin Clarke
Simulation Modeling & Analysis with Arena ®:
A Business Student’s Primer

Justin Clarke

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School of Business & Economics,

Wilfrid Laurier University
75 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON, N2L 3C5
Warning and Disclaimer

This book consists of various basic and intermediate level simulation modeling examples in
Arena® 7.01. All examples have been devised using the Basic Edition of Arena® 7.01 and
are intended for academic purposes only.

This book and its components are provided to enhance knowledge and encourage progress
in the academic community and are to be used only for research and educational purposes.
Any reproduction or use for commercial purpose is prohibited without the prior express
written permission of the primary contributors.

The author and the contributors make no representation about the suitability or accuracy of
the examples provided herewith for any specific purposes and also make no warranties,
either express or implied, or that the use of this book will not infringe any third party
patents, copyrights, trademarks, or other rights. The examples and constituent data are
provided "as is". The author, contributors, and School of Business shall have neither liability
nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from
the information contained in this book or from the use of the examples and models that
may accompany it.

The opinions expressed in this book belong to the author and are not necessarily those of
the School of Business, Wilfrid Laurier University.

Feedback Information

The author and the reviewers of this book have created and tested the examples and
models in this book with care and precision. It is our goal to create a primer of the highest
quality and value, and your feedback as a reader will be a natural continuation of this
process. If you have any comments on how we can improve the quality of this book, or
otherwise alter it to better suit your needs, you can contact the author and/or the editor.

We greatly appreciate your assistance.

Author -- Justin Clarke: justin@webartpromotions.com

Editor -- Umar Ruhi: uruhi@wlu.ca

Trademark Acknowledgements

All terms mentioned in this book that are known to be trademarks or service marks have
been appropriately capitalized. The author and reviewers cannot attest to the accuracy of
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• Microsoft®, Microsoft Excel®, and Microsoft Word® are registered trademarks of

Microsoft Corporation.
• Arena® is a registered trademark of Rockwell Software Inc.
• Mr. Lube® is a registered trademark of Mr. Lube
About the Author

Justin Clarke is currently a fourth year business student at Wilfrid Laurier University in the
Honours Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) program. He is specializing in Marketing
and is pursuing a minor in Computer Science. Justin has served as President of PRISM, an
information technology business that operates within Wilfrid Laurier University providing IT
solutions to over 2500 members. He also runs a consulting business, WebArt Promotional
Services, providing IT consulting to small businesses specializing in e-business solutions.

About the Reviewers

Alan Marshall is a Lecturer in Finance in the School of Business and Economics, where he
has also frequently taught Business Decision Models and Operations Management. He has
also taught at Atkinson College, where he was for 16 years, and the Schulich School of
Business, both at York University. Mr. Marshall's professional experience has included three
years at General Motors and running his own consulting firm, which has engaged with
institutes, multi-national firms and a foreign government. He has also been a Provincial
Examiner for the Society of Management Accountants and an instructor for both the
Institute of Canadian Bankers and the Canadian Securities Institute.

Umar Ruhi is a member of the Operations and Decision Sciences Area and he lectures in
Management Information Systems, Operations Management and e-Business at the School of
Business & Economics. A software engineer by profession, Umar holds a B.Sc. degree in
Computer Science and an M.B.A. in e-Business & Knowledge Management. With over six
years of experience in e-Business consulting, Umar has managed operational technology
projects through the design to the deployment stages, and consulted for multinational
organizations such as General Electric, and Cisco Systems. His professional qualifications
include various industry endorsed certifications including those from IBM, Cisco, Novell and
Sun Microsystems. Additionally, Umar has lectured in various information systems and e-
Business courses at the college and university level around Canada, and he has also been a
visiting research scholar at Johns Hopkins University in the U.S. Umar’s research interests
include Management Information Systems, Knowledge Management, Mobile Technology
Applications, Community Informatics, and Supply Chain Management Information Systems.
 Simulation Applications in Queuing Theory

Simulation Applications in
Queuing Theory:
Operationalizing Fundamental
Waiting Line Models

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 Simulation Applications in Queuing Theory

Table of Contents
1.0 Warnings .................................................................................................... 78
2.0 Prerequisites ............................................................................................... 78
3.0 Special Functions ......................................................................................... 78
4.0 Counters..................................................................................................... 80
5.0 Balking ....................................................................................................... 83
5.1 Balking if more than X in entire system ........................................................ 83
5.2 Balking if more than X in queue .................................................................. 85
6.0 Separated Waiting Lines................................................................................ 88
6.1 2 Separated Waiting Lines.......................................................................... 88
6.2 N Separated Waiting Lines ......................................................................... 89
7.0 Additional Resources .................................................................................... 93
7.1 Previous Arena Workbooks ......................................................................... 93
7.2 Arena Manuals.......................................................................................... 93

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 Simulation Applications in Queuing Theory

1.0 Warnings
Do NOT save your Arena models on floppy disks. Floppy disks are a very fragile media and
are bound to become damaged no matter how carefully you take care of them. Save your
work frequently onto a more stable source such as a hard drive, network drive, or a USB
key. It should be noted that USB keys aren’t without their own problems – but they are
much more reliable than floppy disks.

Do NOT save documents directly on the hard drives of public computers as those files are
often deleted every time you reboot the computer. If the computer crashes and reboots,
you will lose any files on the hard drive.

Do NOT save Arena models deep within the folder structure of your computer. There is a
limitation in Crystal Reports (the reporting mechanism of Arena) that cannot handle
exceptionally long file paths. In newer operating systems (Windows 2000 or Windows XP) if
you save your Arena models under My Documents or the Desktop you may have problems.
This is because the actual path to these folders is already quite long. For example, the path
to the My Documents folder in Windows XP is “C:\documents and settings\user name\My
Documents”. If you were to save your model within a few folders under My Documents, it is
likely you would run into this problem. A safe location to save these models is to create a
folder called “Arena” directly on the C:\ drive and then create a folder for each model inside
this folder.

Arena will not display reports if you run your simulation from a non-writeable media (such
as a CD or a write-protected floppy/USB key), as it cannot write the reports. Also, Arena will
not display reports if you run the simulation from inside a compressed folder (zip) for the
same reason. Save your model to the hard drive or a writeable media before running the
simulation.

2.0 Prerequisites
This module assumes you have working knowledge of building models in Arena, running
simulations, and analyzing results. If you haven’t used Arena in awhile (or have never used
it at all) it is highly recommended that you work through some of the resources identified in
the “Additional Resources” section.

3.0 Special Functions

Arena has several special functions that are used in gather information on the status of
entities, queues, and resources. This information is useful when calculating conditions.
Some of these functions will be defined in this section (according to the Arena help files)
and will be referred to later in this module.

EntitiesWIP (Entity Type) — Number of entities in process. This variable stores the total
number of entities of the specified type that are currently in the system (Work In Process).

NQ ( Queue ID ) — Number in queue. NQ returns the number of entities in queue Queue

ID.

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 Simulation Applications in Queuing Theory

NR ( Resource ID ) — Number of busy resource units. Each time an entity seizes or

preempts capacity units of a resource, the NR variable changes accordingly. NR is not user-
assignable; it is an integer value.

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4.0 Counters
Counters can be used in Arena to measure and report a specific statistic. For example, you
may wish to count the number of entities that pass through the TRUE and FALSE paths of a
condition.

Examine the following model:

The situation shown above is a movie theatre where, after buying tickets, customers have a
50% chance of continuing to also buy concessions. This is modeled using a condition
module with a 50% 2-way by chance.

When you run the report on a model like this, you are able to obtain numbers on the
number of entities who left the Buy Tickets process, and the number of entities who left the
Buy Concessions process, but to determine those who did not enter the Buy Concessions
process would require subtracting the difference between those two numbers. While this is a
fairly trivial task, it would be preferable if those counts could be ready in the report after
you run it. That is where counters come in.

In this example, we will add two counters (or record modules) after the TRUE and FALSE
points of the decision module. These counters will increment every time an entity passes
through them, and these statistics will be displayed at the end of the report.

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The following is an updated flow chart with the two record modules:

You must simply add the record modules in the appropriate part of the flow chart (where
you want the increment to happen) and name them accordingly.

Num Buy Concessions Properties:

Num Skip Concessions Properties:

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 Simulation Applications in Queuing Theory

Result from report:

As you can see, you now have an accurate picture of the number of entities which bought
and skipped the concessions process. Counters can be used in many other similar
circumstances.

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 Simulation Applications in Queuing Theory

5.0 Balking
Balking is an event whereby an entity decides against entering a queue because of its size.
An example of this would be a person deciding against using an ATM machine because there
are 3 people in line.

Simulating balking is likely handled in the following two ways:

1. An entity will not enter the system if there are more than X entities in the entire
system
OR
2. An entity will not enter a specific queue if there are more than X entities waiting in
the queue

5.1 Balking if more than X in entire system

When to use this method: This method is the easiest way to simulate balking, however it
is only applicable when balking is based on the number of people in the entire system, not
the number of people in only one queue of one process.

Situation: You are to model a walk-in clinic. Arrivals are 2 patients per hour in a Poisson
distribution. First, a patient must register with a nurse before seeing the doctor. There is
only one nurse on duty with service time being exponentially distributed at 3 minutes. Next,
a patient must enter a queue to see the doctor. The doctor takes 18 minutes in an
exponential distribution to see each patient. Patients arriving will balk (choose to go home /
go to another clinic) if there are more than 5 patients in the entire system (i.e. waiting to
register with the nurse, being registered by the nurse, waiting to see the doctor, being seen
by the doctor).

The following is a flow chart of this system (before modelling balking):

Note: We are assuming at this point that you are familiar with creating entities, resources,
and processes, setting their arrival/service times, and setting up the simulation run time.

In order to simulate balking, we must do the following:

1. Create a condition called “Balk?” before any of the processes (i.e. just after the
create module) that, when TRUE, will continue with the process, and when FALSE,
will dispose the entity without entering any of the processes.
a. TRUE links to the Register with Nurse module
b. FALSE links with the next module
2. Add a Balked Patients dispose module that links to the FALSE path of the condition
3. Add a counter (record module) to count the number of patients served (placed just
before the Patients Served dispose module)
4. Add a counter (record module) to count the number of patients that balked (placed
just before the Balked Patients dispose module)

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 Simulation Applications in Queuing Theory

The following is a flow chart of the updated system:

Adding the record modules is done in order to create a statistic that can be analyzed in the
report to determine how many balked and how many were served. These two numbers
should add up to the NumberOut variable in the report. As this was covered earlier, we will
not go into detail on setting these modules up. Furthermore, creating the dispose module is
fairly simple as well, so it won’t be covered.

The “Balk?” Condition:

The following is the properties of the balk condition:

Under Type, choose “2-way by Condition”. This means that a condition expression will be
provided that will determine the path the entity will take. This is opposed to “2-way by
Chance” where the path of the entity is based solely on a percentage (i.e. TRUE = 90% of
the time)

Under IF, choose “Expression” (as we are building an expression)

Under Value, type “EntitiesWIP(Patient) <= 5”. You may notice EntitiesWIP from an
earlier section. It is a function that will count the number of entities in the entire process.
You must provide the name of the entity between the parentheses ( and ) (in this case the
entity has been named “Patient”, the default entity name is “Entity 1” if you have not
changed it).

When this condition is evaluated (i.e. whenever an entity is created), it will count the
number of entities in the system, and if the count is less than or equal to five, it will

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evaluate the condition to TRUE and continue the entity on the normal path. If FALSE (i.e.
more than five entities in the system), the entity will balk and be disposed early.

5.2 Balking if more than X in queue

When to use this method: This method is a more difficult way to simulate balking,
however it is more flexible than the previous method. For example, only this method works
if you are modelling a multi-stage (multiple process) system and balking can happen before
each individual process (i.e. the entity could balk upon entering the first process, but if it
continues, it could also choose to balk before entering the second process). In that
example, balking is based on the number in the queue that the entity is entering, not on the
number of entities in the entire system (across all processes).

Situation: You are to model an ATM machine. Arrivals are Poisson distributed at 8 per hour.
ATM service time is exponentially distributed at 4 minutes. People will balk (choose to not
use the ATM) if there are more than 3 people in the queue (and being served).

Note: We are assuming at this point that you are familiar with creating entities, resources,
and processes, setting their arrival/service times, and setting up the simulation run time.

The following is a flow chart of the system (before modelling balking):

In order to simulate balking, we must do the following:

1. Create a condition called “Balk?” before any of the processes (i.e. just after the
create module) that, when TRUE, will continue with the process, and when FALSE,
will dispose the entity without entering any of the processes.
a. TRUE links to the Use ATM module
b. FALSE links with the next module
2. Add a Balked People dispose module that links to the FALSE path of the condition
3. Add a counter (record module) to count the number of patients served (placed just
before the People Served dispose module)
4. Add a counter (record module) to count the number of patients that balked (placed
just before the Balked People dispose module)

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 Simulation Applications in Queuing Theory

The following is a flow chart of the updated system:

As mentioned in the previous example, adding the record modules is done in order to create
a statistic that can be analyzed in the report to determine how many balked and how many
were served. These two numbers should add up to the NumberOut variable in the report.

The “Balk?” Condition:

The following is the properties of the balk condition:

Under Type, choose “2-way by Condition” as in the previous example.

Under IF, choose “Expression” (as we are building an expression)

Under Value, type “NQ(Use ATM.Queue) + NR(ATM) <= 3”. You may notice NQ and NR
from an earlier section. NQ is a function that will count the number of entities in a queue.
You must provide the name of the queue between the parentheses ( and ) (in this case the
process module has been named “Use ATM” – you must add “.Queue” after the name of the
process module). NR is a function that will count the number of utilized resources (i.e. the
number of people being served in the process, usually one or zero). You must provide the
name of the resource that is used by the process between the parentheses ( and ) (in this
case the resource was named “ATM”).

Note: This not only counts the number of people waiting in line but also includes the person
actually being served. Therefore, if the question/problem/situation dictates that an entity
will balk if there are more than three people waiting (excluding any being served), then you
would exclude the “+ NR(ATM)” portion of the expression.

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 Simulation Applications in Queuing Theory

When this condition is evaluated (i.e. before the entity enters the process), it will count the
number being served and waiting, and if the count is less than or equal to three, it will
evaluate the condition to TRUE and continue the entity on the normal path. If FALSE, the
entity will balk and be disposed early.

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6.0 Separated Waiting Lines

So far, you have been taught how to simulate waiting lines by having entities line up before
a process in a single line and when a spot becomes available in the process, an entity
moves out of the queue and enters the service area. This applies if there is one or more
resources.

However, you haven’t learned yet how to allow a multi-channel (i.e. multiple
server/resource) process to have its own line.

6.1 2 Separated Waiting Lines

Situation: You are to simulate a Bank Teller system. Arrivals are Poisson distributed at 12
per hour. There are always two tellers on duty at any given time. Teller service time is
exponentially distributed at 7 minutes. When customers arrive they see two lines, one for
Teller #1 and a separate one for Teller #2. When they arrive, they must choose which line
to enter (and they are not allowed to switch lines once they have chosen one). A customer
will choose Teller #1’s line if the number of people in line #1 is less than or equal to the
number of people in line #2 (includes person being served by teller).

The following is a flow chart of the process:

Everything here is fairly standard – there are two process modules (and each process
module has a unique resource: Teller #1 and Teller #2). The only tricky part to this model
is the condition underlying the “Which Line?” condition module.

We must program a condition such that entities will evaluate the line length of both modules
and choose lower of the two. Since a condition module always has a TRUE and a FALSE
connection, we must write the condition such that when TRUE, the entity will continue along
to Teller #1, and whenever FALSE, will travel to Teller #2.

“Which Line?” Condition Module Properties:

Name: “Which Line?”
Type: 2-way by Condition
If: Expression
Value: NQ(Teller 1.Queue) + NR(Teller Resource 1) <= NQ(Teller 2.Queue) + NR(Teller Resource 2)

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As shown previously and NQ counts the number of entities in a queue, NR counts the
number of a resource being utilized (in this case the value will be 0 if no one is being
served, 1 if someone is being served). This formula will check to see if the total number in
the Teller #1 line is <= the total number in the Teller #2 line.

After running a report, you can see the number of people served by Teller #1 and Teller #2
(shown below). It’s important to realize that if the service times are the same for both
processes, the first process will most likely serve more entities than the second process
because people will enter it first if there is a tie.

Report:

6.2 N Separated Waiting Lines

The previous example showed how to create two separated waiting lines. However, you may
run into situations where you require more than two. This is done similarly with a Condition
Module, however, it requires the use of a “N-Way by Condition” type.

First, set up your model without the decision module. In this case, we will add another teller
to the system:

Next, we must add a decision module:

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Now, we must add the conditions to the decision module. Instead of choosing “2-way by
Condition”, we must choose “N-Way by Condition” and add 2 conditions. The first condition
will, when TRUE, send the entity to Teller #1, the second condition, when true, will send the
entity to Teller #3. A third condition isn’t needed because if the first two conditions aren’t
met, then the FALSE path will be connected to Teller #3.

This example can be expanded to accommodate as many tellers as possible. The important
point to note is that you need to define N - 1 conditions where N is the number of separate
paths.

Adding Conditions to N-Way Condition Module:

To add a condition to an N-Way Condition Module, double click the module, and choose “N-
Way by Condition” under type.

Next, click ADD and type the expression in the box shown below:

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After typing your condition, you will click OK twice to go back to the model and you must
then connect that condition to the next appropriate module.

Condition #1:
- Is the line for Teller #1 shorter than the line for Teller #2?
AND
- Is the line for Teller #1 shorter than the line for Teller #3?

- Arena Expression: (one line)

( NQ(Teller 1.Queue) + NR(Teller Resource 1) <= NQ(Teller 2.Queue) + NR(Teller Resource 2) ) && ( NQ(Teller
1.Queue) + NR(Teller Resource 1) <= NQ(Teller 3.Queue) + NR(Teller Resource 3) )

The first part of this expression (before the && symbol, which means AND) takes the
number in queue of Teller #1 plus the number being serviced by Teller #1 and compares it
with the same for Teller #2. The second part of this expression compares the same values
against Teller #3.

After adding this condition to the decision module, link that condition to the Teller #1 path:

Condition #2:
- Is the line for Teller #2 shorter than the line for Teller #3?

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- Arena Expression: (one line)

NQ(Teller 2.Queue) + NR(Teller Resource 2) <= NQ(Teller 3.Queue) + NR(Teller Resource 3)

After adding this condition, link it to Teller #2:

ELSE Condition:

Finally, link the Else condition to Teller #3:

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7.0 Additional Resources

7.1 Previous Arena Workbooks
It is highly recommended that you review the BU275 module of the Arena Workbook if you
haven’t used Arena in awhile. It covers discussion on the different types of systems you will
encounter, problem analysis, arena modelling, data collection & curve fitting, reviewing
reports, and making recommendations.

7.2 Arena Manuals

Arena comes with a series of manuals that are very helpful.
5. Open Arena
6. Click Help
7. Click Product Manuals
8. Choose “Arena Basic Edition User’s Guide”

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