Learn Explore queues and bottlenecks before recommending extra capacity.
Start with everyday situations, predict an outcome, and test your ideas. You need basic arithmetic, percentages and graph reading; explanations introduce additional ideas where needed. No coding or account is required. Every investigation has school, college and workplace extensions—you can choose any of them.
Diagnose bottlenecks, plan time-specific capacity and replenishment, and compare reliability and allocation policies without hiding distributional trade-offs.
Open any topic directly. Review functions and graphs whenever useful.
The original two-investigation starter remains available. Choosing the full course adds its published lessons to your selected scope; your earlier work stays saved. Skipping does not count as completion or understanding.
Free exploration: no completion scope selected yet. Project reports and independent evidence are tracked separately.
Choose a unit, then open a lesson on its own page. This outline lists the sequence; it does not combine the full lessons into one page.
Explain queues and bottlenecks, then place staffing capacity against a demand profile.
○ Not marked complete · Included · Practice check available
Why can a queue form even when average demand equals capacity?
Original synthetic service desk: eight one-minute intervals, arrivals enter before service, and unfinished people remain in a first-in queue.
○ Not marked complete · Included · Practice check available
Which stage should receive extra capacity?
Original synthetic two-stage workshop: new items enter stage A each hour; stage B may process them in the same hour; unfinished items accumulate between stages.
○ Not marked complete · Included · Practice check available
Do equal staffing budgets produce equal service?
Original synthetic scenario. Six service periods have demand [3,3,12,12,6,3]. Three staffing schedules use equal total staff-periods but distribute them differently.
Account for incoming orders and delayed feedback before increasing local corrections.
○ Not marked complete · Included · Practice check available
Why can empty shelves trigger too many replacement orders?
Original synthetic scenario. A ten-day store starts with 12 items. Orders arrive after a fixed delay, unmet demand is lost, and day five has twice the normal demand.
○ Not marked complete · Included · Practice check available
Can correcting a stock gap too aggressively amplify orders?
Original synthetic scenario. A supplier fills orders after a delay. A store targets 20 items, normally sells six per day, and faces one demand shock on day four.
Distinguish independent and shared failures, and justify an allocation rule with service floors.
○ Not marked complete · Included · Practice check available
When does redundancy improve an entire service?
Original synthetic scenario. A service needs every serial stage to work. Each stage can have one component or two independent parallel components; a shared outage disables all.
○ Not marked complete · Included · Practice check available
Does maximizing a weighted score produce fair service?
Original synthetic scenario. Three branches each need eight items. A shipment suffers a selected damage fraction; allocation rules prioritize arrival order, equal turns, or assumed benefit.
Model a service desk, workshop or small supply chain. Choose a bottleneck or shortage, compare two interventions, and stress-test the recommendation against timing, delayed delivery or shared failure. Use evidence from at least two experiment mechanisms; improved local utilization alone is not sufficient.
Save a report, compare captured evidence, and attempt three new cases. A completed report records submitted work; the rubric supports a separate human review of its quality.
Loading saved experiments…
Progress is saved in this browser when storage is available. Review your experiments and export a backup in My Work.