Description
1 Introduction
Pat & Mat 1 are two friends who try to solve different problems—many of which are self-made. You can see them in
action here, if you wish. They have recently decided to begin their culinary careers by opening their first restaurant
at the University of Toronto. Their restaurant in the first floor of Bahen Centre for Information Technology would
have a small kitchen that can prepare only one order at a time. They expect to have a large number of customers
during rush hour. So, they will need to have some approach to pick the next customer to serve among all waiting
ones, such that they maximize their profit and/or customer satisfaction.
There are different parameters that they need to consider when deciding which customer should be served next.
Each customer’s order requires a specific amount of time to prepare, and will earn a specific profit. For example, one
customer’s order may require 10 minutes to prepare for a profit of $200, while another order may be prepared in 15
minutes for a $350 profit. Further, customers will not wait in the line indefinitely; each customer will leave after some
time based on their level of patience. For example, one customer will leave if their order is not picked in 10 minutes,
where another customer will wait up to 30 minutes.
Pat & Mat invited two friends, Max and Pac, to help them decide how to serve their customers. All four proposed a
different serving approach, and they cannot agree unanimously on any:
1) Pat suggested serving customers based on their arrival time, (i.e., selecting the customer who arrives
earliest). He argued that this is a fair way of doing it.
2) Mat thinks that it will be easier to just select the last person who arrives.
3) Max only thinks about money, so he suggested selecting the customer who can bring the highest profit.
4) Pac thinksfood should come fast, so he suggested selecting the customer whom can be served in the shortest
time.
When Pat & Mat failed to decide on the best approach, they decided to get your help.
They are asking you to write a simulator to see how each approach works in different scenarios. In this project
(“Assignment 1”), you will design and develop a restaurant simulator to simulate these four different approaches to
find out which is the best. Note that there might be multiple strategies are the best.
2 Simulation Overview
Computer simulations are great for exploring “what if” questions about scenarios before, or instead of, letting those
scenarios play out in the real world. Real world problems are usually very complex due to having many parameters
involved, which makes it difficult to simulate them precisely. Hence, we usually simulate a simplified version of the
real problem in which less-yet-important parameters are involved only. This enables us to study the effect of each of
those parameters on the outcomes.
1 For more information on Pat & Mat, you may want to see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat %26 Mat
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In this assignment—simulation of a simplified restaurant—you will implement a turn-based simulation. In this model,
each turn represents one unit of time (here minute) in the real world. Further, events can happen at the beginning of
a turn. For example, a customer is considered entering the restaurant or leaving it only at the beginning of a turn. As
another example, a customer order is started to be prepared at the beginning of a turn, and it will be prepared at the
beginning of another turn. In other words, each order needs an integer number of turns to be completed, e.g. 4 turns,
15 turns, etc. We also assume that the order of only one customer is prepared at a time.
Here, it is a simple example of how one run of the simulation would look like: Alice and Bob enter the restaurant at
time 1. With some serving approach, Alice’s order is picked to be prepared, and it needs 4 turns to be prepared. Carol
enters the restaurant at time 3, joining Bob who is still waiting in the line. At time 5, Alice’s order is ready, and (with
some serving approach) Carol’s order is picked to be prepared, and it needs 8 turns. At time 10, Bob’s patience is over
and he leaves the restaurant. At time 13, Carol’s order is ready, …
There are two criteria that we want to use to measure the success of a serving approach:
1) Restaurant Profit. What is the total profit for each scenario? Obviously, Pat & Mat are not running a charity
restaurant. They want to maximise their profit.
2) Customer Satisfaction. How many customers have they served? Although they want to maximize their profit,
they also want to have a good reputation. If many customers are turned away, they will lose customers over
time, which is not good. Furthermore, those customers who leave may post negative reviews on Yelp, which
will hurt their brand and reduce their profit in the future.
3 Simulation Classes
We will review the purpose and functionality of main classes that you need to complete in this assignment.
Simulator
This class is responsible for reading the simulation scenario from a file, creating instances of different serving
approaches, dispatching different events (a new customer arrives, and start of a next turn), and printing results at
the end.
All of the functions that are necessary for it to work are already implemented in the starter code. However, you can
add any additional function or attribute if it helps your development. However, note that in the auto-testing, you can
only call methods of a simulator object from another object that are defined in the starter code.
The starter code for the simulator (simulator.py) also shows you some of the methods of other classes that you need
to implement. So read it carefully, and be sure that your implementation of other functions are compatible with it.
Customer
This class represents a customer that will enter the restaurant. Each customer has the following information:
ID. A unique id that is used to easily identify that customer.
Profit. The profit the restaurant will earn if the customer’s order is prepared.
Prepare Time. The number of turns needed to prepare the order.
Patience. The maximum number of turns that this customer will wait for their order to be picked for
preparation.
The starter code (customer.py) gives you some overall hint of what you should implement. However, this is your job
to implement all necessary methods that will be called by other objects.
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Restaurant
The restaurant abstracts the common functions among different serving approaches. It also defines the function that
will be called by the simulator:
Event receiver for arrival of a new customer.
Processing the events that happen at the turn (including which customers leave due to not being served, and
which customer’s order is picked if the previous order is finished).
Printing the final results at the end of simulation (total profit and number of customers that were served).
You will implement four subclasses that implement the different serving approaches that were suggested by Pat,
Mat, Max, and Pac. These classes will be called PatApproach, MatApproach, MaxApproach, and
PacApproach.
The starter code (restaurant.py) includes the function signature of three main functions that you should
implement: add_customer, process_turn, and write_report. Note that you may decide to leave one or
more of these functions as abstract in the superclass, and implement them in subclasses. Alternatively, you may
implement some common parts in the superclass, and complete them in subclasses. Please note that you should
follow the function design recipe for all of the functions that you implement. In the starter code, you may be given
part of it, and should complete them with any missing part.
4 Report File Format
The function write_report of the restaurant class(and/or its subclasses) should write a short report of simulation
results at the end of simulation. Here, it is the format of the output that should be written in the report file for a
specific restaurant. There should be three lines.
The first line should be:
Results for the serving approach using NAME’s suggestion:
Where NAME is replaced by Pat, Mat, Max, or Pac. For example, if this is Pat’s suggested serving approach, then it
should be:
Results for the serving approach using Pat’s suggestion:
The second and third line should print the total profit and number of customers that served in the following way:
Total profit: PROFIT
Customer served: CUSTOMER_COUNT
For example, if the total profit is $25.3 and it served 11 customers, then it will be:
Total profit: $25.30
Customer served: 11
Please pay attention to the exact formatting or requested output. Your code will be tested with an automated script.
If there is any difference between your output and requested output (even if it is a single typo or additional dot or
colon), your answer will be considered wrong.
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5 Scenario File Format
Each scenario of customer arrivals is presented in a text file. In this file, each line represents a customer, and contains
5 numbers that are separated by tabs:
The first number is the turn that this customer will enter the restaurant. You can assume that customers
appear in the file in the order that they arrive, i.e., the turn number is non-decreasing. However, note that
multiple customers may enter the restaurant in one turn.
The second number is the unique customer id. The only assumption that you can have about customer ids is
that they are unique integers (so, no two customers will have the same id).
The third number is the profit that the restaurant will get if they fulfill this customer’s order.
The fourth number is the number of turns that we need to prepare this customer’s order.
The last number is the maximum number of turns that this customer will wait for their order to be selected
for preparation before leaving the restaurant.
The scenario file of the example that we described in Section 2 will be:
1 23215 13.00 4 8
1 58923 5.99 6 9
3 38623 11 8 3
6 Declaring Your Assignment Team
You may do this assignment alone or in a team of 2 students. Your teammate should be different from any other
partners that you have had (or going to have) in the labs (tutorials) and Assignment 2. You must declare your team
(even if you are working solo) using the MarkUs online system. Assignment and team declaration will be active from
June 2. Teams are required to be declared from June 2nd to June 12th
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Navigate to the MarkUs page for the assignment and find “Group Information”. If you are working solo, say so. If you
are working with other(s):
First: one of you needs to “invite” the other to be partner, providing MarkUs with their cdf user name.
Second: the invited student must accept the invitation.
Important: there must be only one inviter, and the other group member accepts after being invited, if you want
MarkUs to set up your group properly.
To accept an invitation, find “Group Information” on the appropriate Assignment page, find the invitation listed there,
and click on “Join”.
7 Submitting Your Work
Submit the following files on MarkUs by 4:30 p.m. June 17:
customer.py
restaurant.py
simulator.py
Click on the “Submissions” tab near the top. Click “Add a New File” and either type a file name or use the “Browse”
button to choose one. Then click “Submit”. You can submit a new version of a file later (before the deadline, of
course); look in the “Replace” column.
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Only one team member should submit the assignment. Because you declared your team, each of you will get the
same credit for the work. Note that late submissions are not accepted.
8 Special Office Hours
There will be special office hours for this assignment on June 10, from 10 to 12 as well as from 2 to 4, both in BA3201.
This will be the best time to discuss your questions in person with the Assignment Lead TA. In particular, we will NOT
answer questions asked one day before the deadline (in person or online). Start Early!
