I think the problem is the other way around; it could be simplified further. You don't need that much detail to model the simulation; really all you care about

I think the problem is the other way around; it could be simplified further. You don't need that much detail to model the simulation; really all you care about is that you have some distribution of arrival rates, and a distribution of processing time (to get a particular food), and some distribution of food preference, and it takes some x seconds to move to then next food. Perhaps with a food ordering as well. The simulation could have been purely numerical with that (no need for pathing algorithms and whatnot, and avoid his day-long computations for such a simple simulation..), and the main variables to play with are: 1. Food preference 2. Food order 3. Number of instances of food stations 4. Processing time per food But the author included pathing, and all his alternative-strategies then revolved around pathing, but really any path that isn't a simple line (or parallel lines) is probably non-viable, as they would quickly become a mess of people operating at random when they fail to understand whatever convoluted ruleset has been created unless its heavily enforced by the administration . More likely than not, the best solutions probably would have been those that reduce processing time for high-preference food (a designated server), and increasing the number of food stations for those high-preference foods (eg split off deserts from the main food line to a new table, and add 4 locations to pick it up on that table) It'd also address your concerns >hence take into account that one person cannot occupy the same space as another Modeled by the fact that its a queue, and there's only one person being processed at at time at any given station >overhead of routing, blocking Routing only really comes in two forms: Time to move from current station to the next one 1. and enter the queue 2. and skip the queue, and start moving to the next station Blocking probably doesn't matter much; it's doubtful people will actually block each other off beyond the normal block of being processed, except when the buffet has overloaded and all the starving people swarm the tables, and all hell breaks loose; whatever physical blocking does occur will most likely have negligible impact on the system and if necessary, can be easily modeled in the time to switch stations