A plumbing company, a wholesale distributor, supplies plumbing contractors and retailers throughout the Northeast on a next-day delivery basis. The company has a centrally located warehouse to accept receipts of plumbing supplies. The warehouse has a single dock to accept and unload railroad freight cars during the night. It takes 5 hours to unload each freight car. The company's prior records indicate that the number of freight cars that arrive in the course of a night range from zero to five or more, with no indicated pattern of arrivals. If more than two freight cars arrive on the same night, some freight must be held until the next day for unloading. The company wants to estimate the wait time when more than two freight cars arrive in the same night. The appropriate technique to analyze the arrival of freight cars is:
- Integer programming
- Linear programming
- Monte Carlo simulation.
- Regression analysis
Answer(s): C
Explanation:
Monte Carlo simulation is often used in computer modeling to generate the individual values for a random variable. The performance of a quantitative model under uncertainty may be investigated by randomly selecting values for each variable in the model (based on the probability distribution of each variable) and then calculating the value of the solution. If this process is performed many times, the distribution of results from the model will be obtained.
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