Introduction

Laundry rooms are a crucial aspect of college life. Space constraints in dormitories force the use of communal laundry rooms. Because laundry rooms are a shared, limited resource, it is inevitable there will contention for the resource. This contention will result in delays caused by waiting. It is in the college's best interest to minimize delays and keep student turnover high. High throughput increases both student satisfaction and money received by machines.

Inexplicably, many college laundry rooms introduce an inefficiency to the system and cause unnecessary delay. The act of doing laundry is a two-stage process. The first stage is washing, the second is drying. The drying stage takes approximately twice the amount of time as washing. It would be logical, then, to have more dryers in a laundry room than washers to accommodate this higher service time. This is rarely the case. In fact, the number of washers is typically equal to or greater than the number of dryers.

This arrangement presents a problem. If the laundry room is in heavy use, the number of available dryers will drop more quickly than available washers. This results in students washing their clothes but then waiting for dryers to become available. This backlog is a needless detriment to student satisfaction and could be corrected by a altered configuration of washers and dryers.

I have created a laundry room simulator to investigate this problem. In this paper, I will first describe the simulator and the models used to simulate machine and student behavior. Second, I will describe the parameters of the simulation that demonstrates the problem and of the simulations that explore other possible room configurations. Third, I will report results of the defined simulations. Fourth, I will draw conclusions based on these results.