Aplicação de estudo de simulação: um estudo comparativo de cenários para arranjos de filas em supermercado

Abstract

In the competitive environment that is observed in the current world scenario, companies are spending part of their budget on any project that aims to gain some customer loyalty. In a supermarket, the queues are the greater aversion to the costumer, so any gain to reduce lines is of interest to the companies. In addition to new technologies, such as self-checkout and the use of smart tags in order to suppress the need to do an item by item checkout; clever use of space and arrangements of checkout stations can generate sensitive gain to the queuing system. In this study, five scenarios of checkout station arrangements are tested on their indicators: queue size, queue time, system time and occupation of the station. Testing occurs through the use of Arena Simulation Software which makes the process much less expensive, since it would be almost prohibitive to test in a real market. The use of simulation has been growing more and more because the power of its complexity, once one can test from simple systems to robust and high complexity systems, including failures, times, costs, among others system characteristics. The OptQuest tool is also used to know the least amount of stations with a queue size restriction. In general, the indicators were favorable to scenarios with single queue, with or without distinction between costumers. The greater utility of this type of queue system explains the effect. For optimization, the use of single line irrespective of clients had a more favorable outcome.