Pedestrian arrival rate of 5 per h only 3 showing for 1 h during the simulation. Any reason why?

Question

I'm trying to simulate a pedestrian flow in the entrance of an hospital.

We are installing check-in platforms and I want to know how many platforms we should get according to the patient flow.

I'm using Anylogic personal learning edition and when I put an arrival rate of 5 per hour during the simulation only 3 appears.

I'm trying to understand how anylogic works and distribute the pedestrians according to the rate we put.

For the personnal learning edition 1h equal 1min in real.

enter image description here

Answer 1

if you choose rate=5, the pedSource block will generate pedestrians with an exponentially distributed interarrival time with mean = 1/rate = 1/5.

Which means that the average of arrivals on the long term will be 5, but you won't get 5 every hour since it's a stochastic variable.

If you change the seed, you will have different arrivals... click on Simulation: Main and you can change the seed or use a random seed:

Now if you really want exactly 5 per hour in a deterministic way, you need to change the arrival from rate to inject function:

Then you can create an event that runs cyclically 5 times per hour.. or 1 time every 12 minutes:

and you do pedSource.inject(1);