19 ANSWER 9 "At Moe's Tavern, Homer Simpson and his friends often wait in line for a drink. On average, customers spend 2 minutes at the bar and arrive at a rate of 20 customers per hour. The bartender takes an average of 3 minutes to serve each customer. What is the average waiting time for Homer and his friends before they are served a drink?" "Homer Simpson spends a lot of time waiting in line at the Springfield DMV. On average, customers spend 5 minutes at the counter and arrive at a rate of 30 customers per hour. The DMV employees take an average of 10 minutes to serve each customer. What is the average waiting time for Homer before he is served at the DMV?" "Homer Simpson likes to buy donuts at Lard Lad Donuts. On average, customers spend 1 minute at the counter and arrive at a rate of 15 customers per hour. The cashier takes an average of 2 minutes to serve each customer. What is the average waiting time for Homer before he is able to buy donuts at Lard Lad Donuts?" Clearly, t hese are plausible questions and likely are more humorous than anything I could have produced m yself (t hough, given that I am a German Operations Manageme nt profe ssor, one might argue that this is not a high bar to clear). It is certainly goo d enough that I will take advantage o f this technology in the future. Nevertheless, two shortcomings in these questions need to be pointed out. First, t he question really should provide only two numbers, the arrival rate (demand, 20 custo mers per hour in t he first question) and the time to serve one customer (3 minutes in the first question). I have no idea why the additional number (“customers spend 2 minutes at the bar”) is provided and how it should be interpret ed in the context of the question. Seco nd, for queuing theory being the right tool fo r the job, the de mand for the process (the rate of customer arrivals) should be somewhat close to the capacity of the proce ss (t he rate of service). Consider the second question. 30 customers arrive per hour, each o f the m requiring 10 minutes of work. Clearly, o ne DMV employee would not be able to deal with this loa d a nd m ultiple employees would be needed. Though the que stion generated by C hat GPT speaks of “DMV employees” (plural), it does not state how many there are, ma king it i mpossible to answer the question.