Quantifying the service level and manpower needs of food courts in Singapore

It is predicted that the current manual collection of crockery will gradually be replaced by the self-return of used utensils in order to reduce the manpower needs in Singapore. However, no existing methods are available to quantify service level of the cleaning staff and optimize manpower needs for food courts in Singapore. To measure the range of service level provided by cleaners during peak hour in food courts in Singapore, a Service Level Quantifying (SLQ) model is proposed in this paper by investigation of the relationship between customers' return rate, the seating capacity at peak hours and the general efficiency of cleaning staff. Monte Carlo method was applied to further refine the proposed SLQ model. The results obtained via this model are consistent with the observations at NUS canteens as there are rare occurrences of buffer overflow at the collection points. This model can be used by food court managers and the National Environmental Agency of Singapore (NEA) to effectively plan and simulate manpower needs before their on-site deployment.