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Defining a Simulation

Joe Tatusko
Simulating Real-World Processes in Python With SimPy Joe Tatusko 01:34
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00:00 For this course, you can imagine that you’re helping the manager of a movie theater improve the customers’ experience. There have been bad reviews for long wait times, but while the manager would like to improve these wait times, they can’t afford to hire too many employees.

00:15 Your task is to reduce the average wait time for a customer to 10 minutes or less.

00:22 To get started, think about what steps a moviegoer will take before they sit down to watch the movie. They need to arrive at the theater. They need to get in line to buy a ticket. They need to buy the ticket.

00:38 Then they need to get in line to get their ticket checked. They need to have the ticket checked. They need to decide whether or not to get in line for concessions.

00:51 And then they need to either buy those concessions or go directly to their seat.

00:57 Some of these steps can be controlled, like how many employees are selling tickets or at the concessions area, while others have to be estimated based on previous data, like how many moviegoers actually get in line for concessions.

01:10 The more accurate your estimations are, the more useful your simulation will be, so feel free to deep dive into previous data. On the other hand, don’t be afraid to guess. These are simulations, after all, and are easy to modify, so you can identify different scenarios based on these different guesses.

01:27 Now that you know what the scope of this simulation will be, it’s time to start defining the environment.

shakespeare1564 on Nov. 10, 2020

random.randint() seems no longer been exclusive. I’m using Python 3.8 and random.randint(1, 3) yields 3 too.

Bartosz Zaczyński RP Team on Nov. 12, 2020

@shakespeare1564 I think you left a comment under the wrong video. Anyway, that method has always returned a random integer, including both ends of the range:

Help on method randint in module random:

randint(self, a, b) method of random.Random instance
    Return random integer in range [a, b], including both end points.

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