Simulation of Restaurant Operations Using the Restaurant Modeling Studio

The operation of quick service restaurants (QSR) is a highly engineered process, with many factors coming into play: physical layout, equipment availability, and worker staffing levels, positioning, and priorities. The Restaurant Modeling Studio (RMS) provides an analysis platform for investigating the impacts of these factors on critical performance metrics, especially speed of service and service capacity. The key components of the RMS are a simulation engine built in Arena, and two custom applications built on Microsoft Visio—the Kitchen and Process Designers. The simulation engine supports a large number of behaviors, including parallel operations, inventory replenishment, prioritized task selection and many more. The Kitchen Designer and Process Designer provide the user with powerful tools for specifying the physical layout and order fulfillment processes. This paper presents the components of the RMS and its use in an analysis kitchen design comparison and labor deployment standards.