NetLogo User Community Models

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© 2024 Samd Guizani

## WHAT IS IT?

This simulation represents the shopping behavior of customers in a shop or supermarket. It focuses on the waiting time between finishing shopping and paying/exiting the shop, and how this waiting time influences customer satisfaction.

## HOW IT WORKS

Customers are continuously generated using a Poisson distribution. Each customer is assigned a "patience" attribute, which varies for each individual, based on a normal distribution, reflecting the different levels of patience among people.

Customers shop inside the store until they finish, randomly switching from "shopping" to "shopping completed" based on a Bernoulli distribution. Once they finish shopping, they join a queue to wait for an available cashier. If their waiting time exceeds their patience limit, they become unhappy.

Cashiers serve customers on a First-In-First-Out basis: the customer who has waited the longest is served first by the next available cashier. After paying, customers exit the store.

## HOW TO USE IT

During setup, users can define the number of cashiers in the shop.

Both during setup and while the simulation is running, users can adjust:

- The "patience time" behavior of customers by altering the mean and standard deviation.
- The creation rate of new customers (following a Poisson distribution).
- The probability of customers finishing their shopping.

A time plot allows users to track the percentage of unhappy customers due to long waiting times before exiting the shop. Monitors display the actual number of customers and the count of happy/unhappy ones.

## THINGS TO NOTICE

Notice that the percentage of unhappy customers can exhibit transient behaviors due to the randomness in the number of customers generated and their shopping times. By chance, significant queues can form at the cashiers, leading to long waiting times.

## THINGS TO TRY

Observe the interaction between the customer creation rate and the probability of finishing shopping. Even without changing the creation rate, increasing the probability of ending shopping (i.e., spending less time in the shop) can lead to higher levels in the proportion of unhappy customers.

## EXTENDING THE MODEL

Currently the number of cashiers is set at the begining of the simulation (part of setup procedure) and cannot be changed during the execution. An improved simulation could allow to adapt the number of cashiers depending on proportion of unhappy customers.

## NETLOGO FEATURES

No information in this section.

## RELATED MODELS

- Road Traffic and El Faro models in the NetLogo library.

## CREDITS AND REFERENCES

None.

© 2024 Samd Guizani