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Title QUEUES IN CINEMAS
Full text http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00366536/en/
Date 2009
Author(s) Houda, Mehri; Taoufik, Djemal
Abstract Queues in Tunisia's cinemas are common phenomena. Whenever you walk out to the streets at Saturday afternoon or on public holidays, you can see lines of people queuing at cinemas to book cinema tickets. Not only all cinemas have their operating cost, they do have to bear the cost of keeping customers waiting because impatient customers may turn away and go to competitors' hands.so cinema operators have to minimize the sum of the operating cost and the waiting cost in order to maintain their competitiveness in the industry. Although queuing is unavoidable, technology followers are getting ways to reduce queuing time. Consequently, the company images of the cinema operators will be enhanced and the proportion of balking and reneging customers will be lowered. The way to have less queuing time is achieved by means of computerizing the ticketing system. Because of the inherent inflexibility of pre-printed tickets used in the traditional manual ticketing system, the manual method cannot provide emergency facilities (to open additional ticket selling counters) to relieve heavy demand from sudden inflows of customers; mainly occur on weekends or public holidays. By computerization, the tickets are printed after customers' confirmation of the bookings. Therefore there are no limitations on opening additional ticket selling counters. The resulting strategy is to open additional ticket selling counters during rush periods in order to shorten customers' queuing time. Besides, the computerized ticketing system also fulfils the increasing reporting requirements by management. The data captured at the point of sales provide a very resourceful database. Management information can be requested any time to reflect the most current situation of the cinema operation. Both the single channel and the multiple channels queuing models are discussed to illustrate queuing conditions in cinema ticketing. By appropriate queue design, queuing can be a pleasant waiting environment that is acceptable to the customers.
Subject(s) Computer Science/Operations Research; Service; FIFO; M/M/s; Poisson distribution; Queue; Service cost; Unlimited or Infinite Population; Utilisation Factor; Waiting cost; Waiting Time; Landing; agents; the approach control; estimated time of arrival
Language EN
Publisher HAL - CCSD
Relation http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/36/65/36/PDF/QUEUES_IN_CINEMAS.pdf
Identifier HAL:hal-00366536, version 1
Repository France - Hyper Article en Ligne (HAL)
Added to C-A: 2009-06-22;10:11:13