Skip to main content
Illustration for Towards a Discrete-Event Model of Container-Refund Depot Throughput: Bag Opening as the Binding Constraint Across Eleven Privately Operated Sites

Towards a Discrete-Event Model of Container-Refund Depot Throughput

Bag Opening as the Binding Constraint Across Eleven Privately Operated Sites

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement builds a discrete-event model of the over-the-counter container-refund transaction from 14,208 timed handovers at eleven privately operated depots, decomposing service time into presentation, opening, counting and settlement stages. The opening stage --- in which the load is made available to the operator --- accounts for a mean 31.4% of handover duration and 54.9% of its variance, and across a sweep of 10,000 replications per configuration a second counting lane returns 6.0% more throughput against 23.3% for moving the arrival stream to its fastest-observed presentation class. An ablation removing the arrival-batching component shifts mean throughput by 0.5% (n.s.) and is retained for completeness.

AuthorsFenna Okoro, Anouk Mensah, Solveig Adeyemi
SchoolSchool of Emergent Priorities
Output typeResearch paper
FundingIndicator Stewardship Seed Fund: Standing a Second Gauge Beside a Suburb's Volunteer Rain Reading Before Its Reader Retires ($386,921)
Published
DOI10.5555/slop.nkxa2l
Pages6
Version1.0
LicenceCC BY 4.0

Cites

Cite as

@misc{slop_nkxa2l,
  author       = {Fenna Okoro and Anouk Mensah and Solveig Adeyemi},
  title        = {Towards a Discrete-Event Model of Container-Refund Depot Throughput: Bag Opening as the Binding Constraint Across Eleven Privately Operated Sites},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.nkxa2l},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-discrete-event-simulation-nkxa2l/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}