Examination of the congestion situation of a restaurant in a theme park using feedback control

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to examine a congestion situation of a certain type of restaurant in a theme park (Tokyo Disney Resort) by a simulation based on Little’s law, which is a basic principle in Queueing theory. In the restaurant, a guest (customer) lines up to order, pay and receive dishes. A problem is that even when a guest can easily find vacant tables, it takes a long time to receive dishes. Because guests can see there are vacant tables, there are many tweets of complaints. This situation is a factor to undermine customer satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach This paper proposes dedicated special menu lines only providing special set as one solution that can be realized at a low cost to reduce vacant tables. Here, if the number of special menu lines is fixed, the difference between a queue in regular lines and that in special menu lines will be big. To shorten the difference, the author proposes a technique to regulate by using feedback control (Proportional control or Fuzzy control). Findings The simulation result shows that the number of vacant tables decreases by about 16 per cent compared with the current situation. Originality/value This paper considers a specific restaurant, but the proposed method can be applied to the same type of restaurant in the theme park. If the restaurant in the theme park is crowded, the feedback control of the queue brings new possibilities.

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