An airline ticket counter forecasts that 220 people per hour will need to check in. It takes an average of 2 minutes to service a customer. Assume that arrivals are poisson distributed and service times exponentially distributed and that customers wait in a single queue for the first available agent. a) If we want the average time a customer spends in the queue and in service to be 10 minutes or less, how many ticket agents should be on duty?
b) There airline wants to minimize the cost of idle ticket agents and the cost of customers waiting in the queue. The salary of a ticket agent is £12 per hour and the cost of a customer waiting in the queue is £5 per customer per hour. How many ticket agents should be on duty?