Track: Modeling and Simulation

Abstract

The resident students at the University of New Haven have been complaining of long wait times when picking of their mails and packages from the mailroom.  There is only one central mailroom operating non-holiday weekdays from 8:30 AM to 4:30 PM.  The mail/package dispensing is handled through one window staffed by a mail clerk who handles other mailroom tasks when no one is waiting at the pick-up window.   The one waiting line for pick up grows so large at times that some students miss their classes, meetings, lunches, and other very important obligations so as to not have to come back for another waiting episode at the mailroom queue! The student authors (1^st and 2^nd) selected the improvement of the mailroom operation as their graduate degrees capstone projects with guidance and advising from the 3^rd author.  The mailroom operation was thoroughly studied and modeled using discrete event simulation with ARENA.  Some of the needed data were obtained from the mailroom management while others were collected by observation.  A preliminary and first approximation of the model has already been developed, verified, and validated to mirror the actual mailroom operation on a given workday.  There were multitude challenges from data availability and data integrity to the picks and valleys in demand (students’ pickups) to mail/package arrivals by different carriers. The biggest modeling challenge has been matching of the students with their packages (one or more which is probabilistic) and the team is currently working to implement that scenario.  Other than the scarcity of the resources, both physical (windows) and human (mailroom dispensing clerk), there appears to be job design issues, which would require further study in terms of facility design and operations management.  The presentation at the conference will review the entirety of the project from data collection to model building and testing to the ARENA model(s), the study findings, and the recommendations for the improvement of the mailroom operation.