An Analysis on the Effect of Speed Seats for Congestion Mitigation in a Campus Restaurant Using Multi-Agent Simulation

Campus restaurants in many universities in Japan are crowded during lunch time and the seats in restaurants are not shared efficiently by customers because of a lack of public manners. Some restaurants introduced a system, named speed seat system, which encourages customers to give a seats as soon as they finish their lunch. The speed seat system was reported to be effective and recently of interest among the managers in campus restaurants. It is desirable for the managers to assess the effect quantitatively in advance of its introduction. In this study, a multi-agent simulation model is proposed for the situation during lunch break in a campus restaurant in our university. The model represents both a series of behaviors of customers in the restaurant and interactions among customers. The speed seats are introduced in the model and its effect for congestion mitigation in lunch time is estimated through simulation experiments.