Disney Without The Lines
thank you for joining us everybody we'll get started in about two minutes hello and welcome to one of today's tiger alumni week webinars disney without lines i'm shane ryan an associate director of advancement here at rit and your moderator this evening before i introduce our speaker there are a few housekeeping points i want to go over all attendees have joined in mute mode however your questions can be answered entered in the q a box at any time throughout the discussion we will make every effort to address all your comments and questions throughout the webinar this webinar will be recorded and made available in upcoming weeks a communication with how to access the recordings will be sent out and also posted on our website if you have any technical questions please feel free to type those into the chat box as well and we'll do our best to get you the appropriate answers we'd also like to thank our premier sponsor sharp notions as well as our tiger sponsor rochester regional health for making this week's programming possible we would also like to thank our access services teams for helping us make this webinar accessible for all our alumni real-time captioning is available within the webinar and our interpreters will be sponsored spotlighted throughout the presentation the pandemic has had a major impact on everyone including our students we thank all of our alumni and friends for their support you have given to our students during these uncertain times you are interested in supporting or continuing your support make sure to mark your calendars for this year's roar day which will be held tomorrow we will be giving challenges an alumni scavenger hunt and more so please consider making a gift to support students who need it now more than ever can't wait for roar day you can make a gift right now by visiting rit.edu roar and your gift will be counted towards roar day total and help rit richie achieve its 1.5 million dollar goal now on to our session we are pleased to welcome dr katie mcconkey who will be to take you on a virtual trip to disney and discuss some tips on how to avoid the lines dr mcconkey is an associate professor in rit's industrial engineering department and has been with rit since fall of 2014.
as a former student and graduate of rit's isc department she's very excited to return after compete completing her phd at suny buffalo prior to returning to rit she spent seven years in the industry as a research scientist at kubrick inc during a majority of her last four years with kubrick she acted as a lead data scientist for trove and focused on big data analytics in the energy space to find novel uses of smart meter data together with trove a nationally and nationally leading utilities she created applications for energy theft detection demand forecasting demand response applications for peak energy demand reduction and energy efficiency marketing strategies her primary research interests are in applying operations research tools to improve energy efficiency and resiliency in the electricity and transportation sectors as well as to improve national national and cyber security in her spare time she enjoys visiting disney theme parks around the world and has currently been to every disney park in north america and asia katie thank you for joining us the audience is all yours all right thank you shane um and thank you guys all for being here i'm sure the last thing you want to do is attend another zoom meeting um so i really appreciate you coming to this one ah let's see here let's share screen number two all right so today we're going to talk about touring theme parks without the lines and i've sneakily snuck in some sort of operations research undertones in here to get you excited about industrial engineering as shane said i'm a graduate of rit i'm currently an associate professor in the industrial and systems engineering department i'm also the director of our isd grad program so the outline for today is i'm going to start my class the way i start every class i teach at rit i'm going to tell you all about me it's just one slide and then we're going to learn about operations research at about a 10 000 foot level and then we're going to see some operations research in action and our specific action is that we're going to basically challenge some optimal touring plans strategies um and see if we can beat them with our own strategies and as you can see down here i have many different pictures of myself and my husband with pluto and we're in all four theme parks so here we're in epcot and the magic kingdom hollywood studios and animal kingdom and we're wearing the same outfit it's not because we just only brought one outfit on vacation it's because we're like totally obsessed with disney and we design crazy challenges for ourselves so this particular day we are trying to meet as many characters as possible so as far as like disney background i can say that i've been to disney at least once a year for the past probably 15 years i like to bring disney to my students as well so whenever i'm attending a conference that's close to a disney park i make sure to grab my students and we and we go to the park too um so so far i've been able to bring seven students with me to the park uh and here we see dimple joseph she's actually in the audience today so hi dimple all right so about me these are like the 10 most important things that i tell all my students so one most important thing number one um is my son west he's almost too big to sit on his son his dad's shoulders now he's about 10. second most important thing is my husband he has seen this slide and he's gotten really upset that he wasn't number one but you know the kid comes first third most important thing is uh you guys my students for the day so for the next hour you are the most important thing um as long as my son and husband don't like keel over and die in the background there my attention is all on you uh fourth most important thing are my parents uh here we are i drag them to a halloween party at disney fifth come my my dogs so i have two dogs now six comes up over here it's vacations i like um i love to plan vacations and i'm in complete torture right now not being able to plan anything or go anywhere um so we're going to pretend for the day that we can actually go on a trip to disney and enjoy it so for the next hour so just like come with me on a trip to disney where there's no covet number seven is cute furry creatures i encourage my students to send me pictures of them i enjoy exercise and being healthy my dad's a pe teacher so every time i call him the first question is have you exercised today uh so i make sure to do something um and then rounding out the top ten are geocaching and reading alright so that's everything you need to know about me as far as my professional career shane has already talked about it i was a lead data scientist for trove we did a lot of energy data analytics and i also worked for kubrick inc they're primarily a defense contractor and we did a lot of defense situational awareness work for defense organizations so my background is not necessarily traditional industrial engineering which is often in the manufacturing or service industry it was heavy on data analytics and optimizing systems so i took my sort of data analytics background with me to rit one of the projects i'm working on now is looking at rit's energy demand and if we look at their energy demand we can see for example a typical month has like an energy profile that looks something like this where we can see it's you know high during the week and then the energy is lower on the weekends and it's high during the day and low at night so a typical energy profile but if we sort of draw this imaginary line we can see that there's these three days here that are like a lot higher than all the other days so we're calling those peak days and we call them peak days because clearly the energy is peaking but rit gets charged demand charges based on that highest level of energy demand observed throughout the month and those peak charges are actually about 70 percent of the bill so there's this really high surcharge on our bills based on these days that are higher than all of the other days in the month so we're working on predicting these days ahead of time so that we can employ mitigation strategies to lower the demand on just those three days um and you might wonder well why don't you just run those mitigation strategies on every day typically they involve some sort of thermal control um so we don't want to make people too hot or too cold on all these other days of the month when really we just want to do those options on these three days only and i'm also currently looking at some more traditional operations research type problems um but this time trying to use deep learning so you may have heard of deep learning it's like neural networks with many many many layers and what we're trying to do in these projects is imagine we have you know a whole bunch of threatening zones where we can't go so we can't go in all these red zones but there's targets of interest maybe they're surveillance targets or maybe the people we're trying to rescue at all these little square dots and we have several assets that can go visit these locations and we want to know which location should we visit in which order so that we can maximize our reward but be able to get back home this is actually an extremely difficult problem to solve and if you were to just let traditional integer programs solve it it would just run forever and ever and ever but with our deep learning models we're getting really really good results and it takes less than a second to provide an answer all right so we're coming up on my first pull so i would like to know um have you ever heard of operations research and so you have i think four choices a will be yes i love operations research b will be maybe it kind of sounds familiar c is i've never heard this term before in my life and d is i'm just here because i love disney let's talk about that so let's see if i can start this poll successfully launch launchable alright so if you guys can go put that in so i know a little bit more about my audience um we'll carry on from there all right well 16 of you answered we'll call that good enough all right so it looks like like the biggest answer was yes i love operations research was just kind of cool because um actually typically not too many people have heard of operations research and i'm trying to get people more excited about it so i'm excited to know that 38 percent of you already have heard of it um and you know the quarter of you who are here just because of dizzy that's why i would be here too so i'm happy to have you guys as well all right so let's close this little bugger all right so operations research in a nutshell is the science behind decision making and we're not just concerned about any type of decision what we're concerned about with or is um looking at problems where there's many many many possible solutions and we want to find the one best solution so we want to find the optimal solution um and there's lots of problems that fall into this sort of scheme and what we see with our operations research model a common technique to solve them is to write a mathematical model and solve it and the mathematical models look kind of scary sometimes so they'll look like this um and there's a few important parts of a model and that's what i want you to be familiar with so every model will have an objective and our objective is basically our goal so here this is actually the model for um that threat zone problem that i was talking about earlier um and in that problem what we're trying to do is maximize rewards in our disney example that we're going to go through later we're going to be trying to minimize our time in the park so we always have an objective function and then we always have a whole bunch of constraints and our constraints are basically saying what is and isn't feasible it provides sort of the rules or logic that you have to follow to find an optimal solution so those are the two main parts of an or model you have to identify your objective and then you have to sort of identify your constraints and some of these are budgetary constraints some of them might be more more like logical constraints like you have to go pick up the passenger before you drop him off things like that um so i wanted to go over some applications of or that we're seeing here at rit um in our industrial engineering department one of them which is actually pretty relevant right now is optimizing the assignment of patients to hospital beds so we've had mike cool and dr ruben perano working on that dr ruben parano is also very intimately involved in creating optimal vaccine markets and optimal vaccine marketplaces and what he's trying to do is to show that if basically the whole world worked together that we could provide vaccines to the low-income countries more affordably and still provide profits for the vaccine makers so that everybody is actually happier than they are now i personally am looking at battery uh sort of scheduling models um so right now i'm looking at residential houses and imagine if they had a battery system how would we want to charge and discharge that battery and you can change the objective to be like i want to minimize emissions or you could say i want to minimize cost or i want to maximize my self-consumption of these solar panels so there's a bunch of different objectives and depending on your objective the battery scheduling of charging and discharging is totally different another project by mike cool is looking at automated material handling systems so he has a grant from toyota to develop automated fork truck systems that will drive themselves to where they're supposed to be pick up a load drop it off all without running into other forklifts or people and do it efficiently and this is actually really challenging to figure out not only how to operate the forkshop autonomously but also how to route them and assign tasks and then this example that i was talking about earlier where we're traveling around trying to maximize our rewards is also an example of an operations research project but today we're not going to talk about any of those anymore we're going to talk about or in action and our action is going to be touring theme parks in particular we're going to tour the magic kingdom today and we're going to test out some touring plan strategies to see which one works best okay so i want you to imagine for a second that you're standing at the gates of the magic kingdom you got there really early so you're standing right outside and the train is going to come by in a few minutes and you're getting really excited and you have your map and you're looking at it and everybody in the family is looking at the map and you're like oh i want to see space mountain and someone else is like oh i want to see splash mountain and you're kind of discussing what you're going to do first and then next maybe you're planning your whole day hopefully we've all been to a theme park before maybe some of you have even been to um disney before specifically the magic kingdom and i'd like to know you know which of these strategies that i'm going to present have you heard about so the question is going to come up and it's going to say which of these theme park touring strategies has you have you heard is good and or have you used yourself so you're not ranking these you can choose more than one typically i would pull the audience and i would grab these from you but these are ones that come up more often than others and i might have thrown in some fake ones in here too um but a typical one is like the most popular attraction first so you're going to run to the one that you think is going to have the busiest line or similarly your favorite attraction first they're usually usually pretty similar um you might say hey i'm going to avoid the rush to those popular rides i'm going to go to the least popular attraction first some people have suggested running right to the back of the park first um and then moving on from there while everybody's more towards the front of the park doing those attractions um i've heard always go left i've heard always go right and then there's the hey look squirrel option where you kind of have a vague plan so maybe your plan is like oh i'm gonna go to space mountain but on your way to space mountain you see a parade and you stop to watch the parade and then you follow the parade and then all of a sudden you're on jungle cruise so what have you guys of these touring plan strategies have you heard about before it should be up there and you should be able to answer i should have had like jeopardy music to play while you guys are answering polls all right so let's share these results okay so it looks like a lot of you guys have heard of the most popular attraction first strategy um coming up next is the back of the first back of the park first strategy um hey look squirrel also pretty popular and then these other ones like people have definitely heard of you might have even have tried them um sort of the goal here is just to say yeah of all these strategies we've definitely tried a few of these or heard that they they're good um so let's see when i i hope that made the poll go away all right so so today what we're gonna do is i'm going to give us a list of 10 attractions and our goal is to see these attractions as quickly as possible and then get out of the park so the attractions that we're going to see are space mountain uh it's a wild roller coaster ride in the dark uh we're gonna see splash mountain it's a it's a flume ride with whimsical characters we're gonna see big thunder mountain so this is a wild rest wild west train ride seven doors mine train is another roller coaster in the park it's one of the newer ones uh we'll take a slow cruise on peter pan's flight and we'll ride a pirate ship above london and neverland we'll take a trip on haunted mansion and make sure we don't get picked up by any hitchhiking ghosts we're gonna check out pirates of the caribbean uh we'll take a tour on buzz lightyear space ranger spin which is like a live arcade where we get to battle the evil emperor zerg you definitely have to meet mickey at nicki's town square theater um and we'll round up our day and actually we might not even do this order but we'll definitely be seeing the jungle cruise while we're on our tour um so these are the 10 attractions that our goal is to see these attractions all of them all 10. all right so we have 10 attractions um and i'm not there's not actually a poll associated with this one but i want to pause for a second and think about how many different possible touring plans are there given 10 attractions you know are there 100 possible ones 10 000 a billion what are you guys thinking there's actually 3.6 million ways to see these 10 attractions um so to put that in perspective if we each wrote down one unique order every second for the next eight hours so we're here till like two in the morning just writing down orders we'd only write down 1.1 million of them um so there'd still be another like 2.5 million left to go if we added another five attractions there would be 1.3
trillion ways to see the different attractions so this is an example of combinatorial explosion there's just so many ways to see these different attractions that it becomes highly unlikely that we would be able to choose out of the 3.6 million ways the one best way to see them so that's where operations research is going to come in save the day um so what we're going to do is we're going to test some common theme park strategies and we'll end up comparing them against the optimal touring plan so before we get started let's sort of we'll test our intuition as well so the strategies we're going to test today are back of the park first clockwise counterclockwise least popular attraction first and most popular attraction first and for the least and most popular attraction the way i determined those was i looked at the walt disney world they have like a an app that shows the wait times so i looked at their app the day that i was making these models at 11am and whatever had the longest line at 11am that was the most popular attraction and whatever had the shortest line at 11 am was the least popular attraction so i did it based on wait time okay we're going to be seeing some maps like this so i wanted to take a second and orient you so here we see the clockwise touring plan and if we wanted to look at this map um down here is the park entrance and as you walk in here um the castle would be straight ahead of you and then over to this right right hand side that would be tomorrowland where we'd find rides like space mountain and buzz lightyear and if we went over here to this left-hand side we'd find adventureland and frontierland so that's where pirates jungle cruise splash mountain thunder mountain they all live over there and in the back here is fantasyland so you'll see a lot of these maps you might not be as intimately familiar with the disney layout as i am so i tried to i'll give you some um sort of landmarks here but for our clockwise route we're going to start and meet nikki right away right at the entrance and then we're going to traverse um clockwise around the parks we're gonna then go to jungle cruise followed by pirates of the caribbean head up to splash mountain ride thunder mountain then haunted mansion peter pan we'll ride seven doors mine train and then end our day with space mountain and buzz lightyear space rangers fit if we did that order in the opposite order um that'd be going counterclockwise it'd just be the complete opposite so we'd still start with mickey because he's at the front of the park um but then we'd head to buzz lightyear space mountain go through the back where we'd buy seven doors mine train peter pan haunted mansion and then we'd end with our thunder mountain splash mountain pirates and the jungle cruise our three other plans we're looking at are the first one is most popular first so these are spaghetti diagrams start to go a little bit insane and we're running all over the park but our most popular has us running towards the back and we're going to run ride seven doors to mine train because it's super popular right now because it's new and then we'll head over to space mountain because even though it's older it's still one of the most popular rides in the park then head to jungle cruise and we go way to the front of the park to uh meet mickey then all the way to the back to ride peter pan um then back over to um buzz lightyear space ranger spin across the park again to haunted mansion go to thunder mountain pirates and then end our day with splash mountain and now you might be wondering like oh why is splash mountain last if it's the most popular attraction first um the day that we're hypothetically going is in december around christmas time and at 11 a.m in december it's kind of chilly so not many people are wanting to ride splash mountain early in the morning so that's why i ended up towards the end of the day at least popular first goes similarly kind of all over the place so we're headed toward bud's light year then across the park to haunted mansion then to splash mountain looks like pirates of the caribbean then thunder over to peter pan back to the front of the park before mickey mouse then to jungle cruise and then we end with the busiest rides space mountain and seven doors migrate and then our final option is our back of the park then left um so i actually evaluated back of the park then right and back of the park then left and they were within i want to say like two to three minutes of each other so we're just looking at one option here where we run all the way back to seven doors mine train then we do all the attractions in the back of the park so we're doing peter pan and then haunted mansion and then we just continue to work our way around um so it would be thunder mountain splash mountain pirates jungle cruise zoom across the back park to get to space mountain buzz lightyear and then end our day with mickey mouse so i know that's a lot to take in typically i actually hand these out and people can like hold them and rearrange them and talk to their friends with them but we unfortunately don't have that luxury today so given these five and maybe just your intuition which of these five do you think would be the fastest and if you have somebody in the room with you feel free to like chat with them because it's interesting to see what other people think so do you think it's going to be the back of the park first clockwise counterclockwise least popular or most popular which one of these is going to be the best one looks like i have a few extra choices in that list so feel free to choose those too i just thought of something that this is supposed to be a class without quiz right and then here i am giving you quizzes the whole time it was false advertising all right so let's see what you guys said all right so we're gonna keep track of this order it looks like you guys are tied with the most popular attraction first as being the best most popular and back of the park first but interestingly enough the always go left and always go go right also got you know pretty high votes and least popular attraction first one person also thought that that would be the best so if we put all of you guys in the front of disney and said go follow one of these strategies all of them would be covered and some of us would be unfortunately very wrong but we'll see that shortly alright so similarly it sometimes it's pretty easy to figure out which one would be the best can you guys figure out which one is going to be the slowest which one do you guys think will be the slowest all right i think i got a lot of you if not all of you so looks like we actually have some consensus that the least popular attraction first is maybe not the best thing to let's see do popular i've got eight votes um and some of you still even thought the most popular would really maybe not be the best thing to do i imagine your logic was probably like everybody is doing that one so it can't possibly be good hey look squirrel yes i agree that this is really not the way to go but can certainly be enjoyable all right so here we go so let's see how these touring plans did so oh i'm not going to tell you yet there's yet another bowl okay so between all those strategies what do you guys think is going to be the spread of time between the shortest and the longest plan so what's your sense is it going to be 30 minute difference 60 minute difference one to two hours different could it possibly be a two hour difference between choosing a lousy plan and a good plan what do you guys think we're gonna see today oh you guys have very strong opinions about this you're being very speedy all right so it looks like all of you are rooting for a greater than two hour difference i'm really concerned that i might disappoint you i guess we'll see or at least a one to two hour difference and uh there's general consensus that a good touring plan versus a bad touring plan definitely going to be at least a 30 minute difference there all right so let's see what we find so a little bit about what i did here there is a website called touringplans.com and they offer a personalized touring plan service and in the background they have a time dependent traveling salesman problem running and they have evolutionary algorithm solving these problems so we're using that interface or i use that interface and what it allows you to do is you can put in attractions in a specific order and ask how long is it going to take me if i do them in this order so that's what i did and then you can also say here's the attractions i want to see what's the optimal way to see them so we're going to see our five touring plan options and how they did and then we'll look at how the optimal plan did as well this service is available for free so if you guys want to check it out for your next trip if you go to touringplans.com you can see and plan your next disney trip as well and save lots of time and i am not at all affiliated with them i just think it's a cool example of operations research out in the wild all right so here's the back story we're on a trip the this trip is uh actually results from a trip i plan for friday december 28th 2018. so a couple years back but typically this time of year this is a friday after christmas it's one of the busiest days to go to the magic kingdom in fact if you're saying you're probably not planning a trip to the magic kingdom this day it almost always closes for capacity um and it can be pretty miserable to be there um but we're gonna go anyways and on this very busy busy busy day we're going to see how long it takes us to see these 10 attractions on our list ah so up first this timeline is in minutes so we see our least popular um attraction first strategy is gonna take us eight hours and ten minutes to complete so that is like absolutely miserable so if we follow this strategy you guys a lot of you had a correct intuition here that this is definitely not the way to go um it's going to take 8 hours and 10 minutes to see these 10 attractions not too far behind though is our most popular first attraction route so this is the one of the routes that you guys thought would be one of the best things to do turns out there's going to be three options that are even faster and if we follow this most popular traction first route it's going to take us six hours and 41 minutes to see those 10 rides so it's much faster than our least popular one but we can do better than that coming in in third we have our clockwise option so if we enter the park and we go around clockwise so this is headed to jungle cruise pirates uh keep heading and we end with space mountain and buzz lightyear that's gonna take about seven minutes less so we're finishing in about six and a half hours now keep in mind it's the busiest day of the year so this is six and a half hours of person to person um crowds uh coming up next is back of the park then left so a few of you um had voted for back of the park as the one of the fastest ones and it's definitely um one of the faster ones so it comes in at five hours and 43 minutes if we run to the back of the park and then head around to the left and that's what almost 45 minutes faster than our clockwise option and that leaves our clock our counterclockwise option as the best option for amongst our five so we're gonna head in the park and we're simply gonna go to the right and head um counterclockwise around the park so we're gonna meet mickey then go to buzz lightyear space mountain seven dwarfs and then continue on around and the last thing we'll see is jungle cruise and compared to some of these this is actually a pretty um simplistic looking travel plan it's probably pretty easy to remember you know head in and go right so that's kind of cool um so some observations that we see from these uh five plans is that there's almost a three hour difference between our best plan and our worst plan the problem was we didn't know which was the best or which was the worst um but if we had chosen the best one which not many people did we would have been in and out of this park on the busiest day seeing the 10 top attractions in five hours and 15 minutes um versus eight hours for our sort of worst performing option um another sort of observation that i find interesting is that merely choosing the wrong direction so i don't know about you but i can never keep it straight whether it's go to the right or go to the left um so if you had chosen to go the other way you're going to take it 90 minutes more to get through your day all right katie there were two questions that came in that might be relevant well the first one was how long of the duration is actual time of being on the rides so i don't have that information for these five like right on hand but i do have it for the optimal touring plan and i'll be able to share that once we get there in like two minutes what was the other question the other one was uh uh wonder how much faster clockwise would be if you left mickey for last and started straight with jungle cruise ah see oh i know right like you can just ask these what if questions like all day long um so i'm like right right there with you that i would want to know that too um and if you like find this stuff interesting you can you can like play those games with the with the software like all day long okay so here are our touring plans optimal solution i'm not gonna tell you right away i'm gonna put up a poll so based on what you've seen so far um do you guys have any guesses as to what attractions you're gonna see in the top three so you guys can choose three attractions what do you think are the first three attractions to see on that optimal plan do you have any idea all right looks like we have some consensus all right so it looks like if we're all standing at the front of the park and we're gonna vote we're all going to be running to space mountain first um there are quite a few votes for seven dwarfs mine train as well buzz lightyear is up there in the top a few of you still going to stick with mickey meet mickey at town square theater and then the other boats are kind of all over the place no one's run into splash mountain early on a december morning i don't see why um jungle cruise porch hooker's got no votes all right so let's see what they actually are all right so our top of three attractions are number one the first thing we're gonna go see is we're gonna meet mickey at town square theater and then we're gonna hightail it to peter pan's flight and then we'll see space mountain so if you guys have used the touring plan strategies before um you will have already been familiar that peter pan's actually always one of the top ones because it loads so slowly but the first time i saw this i was like this could not possibly be correct why would i ever run to peter pan's flight first so they have you do things that you'd never really think of um unless you had something that was evaluating all the different possible plans for you all right so with those three if we add in our optimal touring plan uh he comes in at 4 hours and 24 minutes so almost 45 minutes faster than any of the plans we came up with um so it's our optimal plan is three hours and 45 minutes faster than the worst one so it's almost four hours faster than least popular first it's 51 minutes faster than our best plan so almost an hour faster and it's going to take us 4 hours and 24 minutes to see all 10 attractions on arguably the busiest day of the year which is that's like nothing um and in my personal experience i have tried these on the busiest days of the year and gone and done everything i wanted to do and left the park by like noon so they absolutely work all right so here's a closer look at that optimal plan after we see mickey peter pan and uh space mountain uh we sort of take a nice sort of tour around the park so it's headed what's that clockwise ish and someone was asking about a breakdown so we're gonna spend 264 minutes total and then of that 133 minutes we'll be in line waiting so about two hours waiting for these attractions and about an hour walking so three hours so about 90 minutes will actually be um enjoying the attractions themselves all right so let's see what's coming up ah so often so all of these analyses here we're done without fast passes so i'm often asked when we do this in person well what what about fast passes because i know there's fast passes and if you're not familiar with it fast passes basically right now you can well you can't right now but let's pretend there's no coping you can sign up for a time that you want to ride the ride and then you just show up so you show up and then you ride the ride and the line is typically less than 10 minutes so what i did to add fast passes to this analysis is each of these touring plans came with a long list of attractions and how long we were going to wait in each of the lines so i looked at that list for each of these touring plans and i chose the three longest lines for each of the plans and those are the attractions i got fast passes for so the fast passes were different depending on what plan that i was evaluating but doing that getting fast passes for the three longest lines per plan actually shifted them all so that there's less time but still the order remains the same so if we added in fast passes we're going to see our optimal set of attractions in about 200 minutes and that's still about 30 minutes faster or half hour faster than our fastest plan so our um the order of which attractions our best stays the same um but we just get through each plan faster i have a couple more things for you today ah so my next thing you guys might be wondering well what about now like this is this happened two years ago what about now the reason why i'm using two-year-old data is this actually takes a really long time to gather um and the story is always the same so um what about cobit 19 operations so right now the parks are open they're running under limited capacity so i only let so many people in each day and there's no fast passes right now so everybody's in the standby line so i did the same analysis for operations um i think i have the date coming up but a little bit after christmas for this year and one of the changes that i needed to make was that they're not doing character greetings right now so you can't meet mickey so i substituted um winnie the pooh's ride instead of mickey um so if we look at touring times for december 26 2020 and those same touring plan options we're going with no fast passes and limited park capacity and everybody's in a standby line things are actually quite different so we see that our least popular and most popular options um have switched places so most popular becomes the worst thing to do um in the current operation so do not do that one it's actually better to do least popular first right now but even better than least popular first is heading towards the back of the park and then heading left and then our clockwise and counterclockwise options come in actually pretty equitably so before we saw that these were about an hour apart um right now under current operations you can choose either direction and it's like a six minute difference that's really nothing and then our optimal touring plan under the current conditions um comes in only three minutes faster it's just slightly different than heading counterclockwise they just switched the order of peter pan and seven dwarf spine train so there's some lessons to be learned here one is that the counterclockwise clockwise and optimal solutions are all within nine minutes of each other so under current operations you have a lot of flexibility in how you want to tour the parks we also saw that the most popular attraction first becomes the worst strategy to do now so don't do that don't go running to space mountain first thing it's going to end up very badly but probably the most important observation from this is that we can't use observations from one day and assume that it's going to be the optimal plan for a different day so we can't use our pre-covered typical day touring strategies we can't use those now we have to reevaluate what to do and change our plans and that's the same for operations research out in the wild so if you have some or model that you're using for your business you want to make sure you're re-evaluating that model frequently as your conditions in your business change all right so i think this is the last thing is another question you can answer with or is should we sleep in or go to rope drop so rope drop is arriving right um before the park opens and then back in like the 80s they physically held up a rope and dropped it on the ground and you like went running into the park so that's why it's called rope drop all right so let's say um we head into the park this is on that busy day we go in right when it opens at 7am it's going to take us 4 hours and 24 minutes if we decided to sleep just one hour more um that one hour of sleep is going to make our touring time fifty percent longer and that fifty percent longer is just going to be two extra hours waiting in line and if you've ever traveled to disney with a little child you do not want to spend two extra hours waiting in line and then we can sort of see this sort of pattern continue we're in the park longer and longer and longer till about 11 and then it starts to tail off um uh but one thing to see here if we sleep two hours so if we go at nine a.m our two hours of sleep
equals twice as long touring so we're going to be in that park four extra hours which is insane and if we sleep for those two extra hours we might as well just continue sleeping right like don't get up now you might as well sleep all the way till two in the afternoon and go then because it's gonna take you just as long to see those um attractions at two than it will be at nine and if we were to sleep in and enter the park at 11 um you're in for a nightmare of a day it's going to take you 9 hours and 45 minutes to see what would have taken you four hours and 24 minutes to see if you went a rope job um so for me it's like a no-brainer i always go in the morning and then we nap and use the pool in the afternoon all right so lessons learned today is one our intuition can fail us when decisions are complicated or there's a lot of choices so we can use operations research techniques to save significant amounts of time and money so for us on vacation time is definitely important as business operators we're probably very interested in saving money we also learned that we need to reevaluate our solutions as conditions change so we don't want to just find one solution and use it forever and ever and ever as things change whether it's covet or whether it's a rainy day those optimal touring strategies are going to be different we also learned that sleep is very expensive so i'd just like to give a special thanks to touringplans.com for providing that really awesome example of operations research in action and if you guys have any questions i'm happy to stay and answer them i'm very appreciative that you hung on with me this whole time and thank you i'll let it sit here for a second just in case anyone's got a question or two looks like one just came in says thank you you're welcome dog [Music] all right well thank you katie for sharing your expertise with alumni and friends today and thank you at home for joining us as i mentioned earlier we will send information out on how to access the recording in the near future also don't forget to make your roar day gift by using the link in the chat box lastly if you're not already connected to rit alumni association social media channels we encourage you to do so those links can also be found in the chat box thank you again for joining us and enjoy the rest of your tiger alumni week all right thank you guys you
2021-03-26 07:31
