Computer Science · May / June 2016 · Paper 2 SL · Question 5

5. A railway company has ticket machines and manually operated ticket offices in all of its stations. There are two types of ticket machine: Type 1: where tickets which have been purchased online can be collected. Type 2: where tickets can be bought by selecting a journey and date. The ticket offices are manned by employees who sell and renew season tickets and can also carry out the same functions as the Type 2 ticket machines. The distribution of machines and ticket offices at each station causes some problems. Customers complain that: • the ticket offices are often closed when they are needed. • during busy periods they have to wait too long at the ticket machines and sometimes miss trains that they have already booked online. The railway company decides to run computer simulations to compare different ways of organizing the numbers and types of machines and ticket offices in one particular station.

Read automatically from the paper; the printed page above is exact.