we have a system, such as a bank, where customers arrive and wait on a line until one of k tellers is available.Customer arrival is governed by a probability distribution function, as is the service time (the amount of time to be served once a teller is available). We are interested in statistics such as how long on average a customer has to wait or how long the line might be.
We can use the probability functions to generate an input stream consisting of ordered pairs of arrival time and service time for each customer, sorted by arrival time. We do not need to use the exact time of day. Rather, we can use a quantum unit, which we will refer to as a tick.
One way to do this simulation is to start a simulation clock at zero ticks. We then advance the clock one tick at a time, checking to see if there is an event. If there is, then we process the event(s) and compile开发者_Go百科 statistics. When there are no customers left in the input stream and all the tellers are free, then the simulation is over.
The problem with this simulation strategy is that its running time does not depend on the number of customers or events (there are two events per customer), but instead depends on the number of ticks, which is not really part of the input. To see why this is important, suppose we changed the clock units to milliticks and multiplied all the times in the input by 1,000. The result would be that the simulation would take 1,000 times longer!
My question on above text is how author came in last paragraph what does author mean by " suppose we changed the clock units to milliticks and multiplied all the times in the input by 1,000. The result would be that the simulation would take 1,000 times longer!" ?
Thanks!
With this algorithm we have to check every tick. More ticks there are the more checks we carry out. For example if first customers arrives at 3rd tick, then we had to do 2 unnecessary checks. But if we would check every millitick then we would have to do 2999 unnecessary checks.
Because the checking is being carried out on a per tick basis if the number of ticks is multiplied by 1000 then there will be 1000 times more checks.
Imagine that you set an alarm so that you perform a task, like checking your email, every hour. This means you would check your email 24 times in day, assuming you didn't sleep. If you decide to change this alarm so that it goes off every minute you would now be checking your email 24*60 = 1440
times per day, where 24 is the number of times you were checking it before and 60 is the number of minutes in an hour.
This is exactly what happens in the simulation above, except rather than perform some action every time an alarm goes off, you just do all 1440 email checks as quickly as you can.
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