I had the privilege of going on holidays to the European Juggling Convention in the beautiful setting of Bruneck / Brunico [yes, a town with two names] in Northern Italy. This was my 11th EJC in a row [starting with Ptuj, Slovenia in 2005].
Earlier this year, I had set my students a piece of coursework modelling the arrival patterns of people attending this festival. While their predictions about overall numbers were accurate pretty much everything else was wrong. I had somewhat simplified the problem that I gave them to investigate.
What factors should have been included in the modelling process?
Cost of ticket – especially the difference between the pre-registration price and the cost of paying on the door. In recent years the difference between these prices has been deliberately increased by organising teams and it is very difficult to plan for those who arrive without registering in advance. How does a team know how many shows, showers, camping space and toilets are needed for everyone to enjoy the week in comfort unless they have the numbers in advance?
With a greater proportion of people pre-registering, more arrive during the first weekend to get full value out of their ticket and fewer arrive during the night as the convention progresses, meaning that the registration desks can be completely closed down for a good six hours every night for the majority of the week. This was another feature that some, but not all, students picked up on as being a trend.
Ease of registration system – this year Andi did a wonderful job in creating a new system that made onsite processing extremely quickly. This meant that historical information on how long it took to process each arrival was really inaccurate and predictions about the number of desks needed and whether there was a persistent queue were really inaccurate. However, the prediction that nine desks would be an appropriate number for the first few hours was correct! The persistent queue had vanished by 14:30 on the first Saturday because of Andi’s system. My first real observed practical use for QR codes. We ended up being able to fully process a person in an average of about 90 seconds.
(the system in action!)
The data that I gave students was fictional, but plausible data, simulated to give everyone different data to work with having the same underlying structure for consistency. It gave them a chance to examine a real problem, with relevance that they could see for event planning. Incomplete information is an issue that we constantly arrive with in real life, so it is interesting to see the direct consequences of missing information in action, especially when examining the evolution of behaviour over a number of years.
To be decided 