USING SIMULATION TO CHOOSE BETWEEN RENTAL CAR LOT LAYOUTS Todd

In the rental car industry, the number of cars that are waiting for or currently in the process of being cleaned directly translates into unrealized potential income. Although the actual time spent preparing a car for rental (e.g., cleaning, servicing, and fueling) can not be significantly reduced without affecting quality, the number of cars being prepared at a time can be modified. Of course there is a cost involved with any improvements to accomplish this. The simulation project was initiated to analyze various lot layouts proposed by Avis. These layouts would modify the route that cars take as they get returned, fueled, serviced, and washed. The goal was to provide an accurate examination of how these layouts performed with a given set of input parameters, then to modify the parameters in order to determine the maximum capacity of each proposed layout. Case study scenarios would be used to test how parameters such as lane filling algorithms for the check-in lanes, the minimum desired level of cars ready to be rented, the number of scheduled rentals and returns, and employee schedules would affect the defined outputs. Avis also defined the statistics that they were interested in studying. In addition to the capacity of each layout, the walking times for customers and agents, agent utilization, and vehicle driving times would also be ascertained. This information was written to a custom report that could be read by any text editor and analyzed.