A Method of Determining the Number of ATMs by an Agent Model

Abstract

The number of automatic/automated teller machines (ATMs) installed each year is increasing steadily since the ATM is very important for a financial institution to improve customer service. However, a large amount of expense is required for installation and maintenance of ATM. For this reason, a financial institution has to determine the appropriate number of installations of ATM for achieving the desired effect, that is, the achievement of superior customer satisfaction by maintaining the number of installations at a lower level. This paper proposes a method of determining the number of ATMs using an agent model that can deal with customer’s characteristics such as timing of use of ATM, a range of searching for convenient location and a feeling of resistance to queuing. The proposed method uses two values, which are the numbers of uses and opportunity losses of using ATM in order to determine the optimum number of ATMs. Through the experiments, we apply the method to the case of two areas in Kanazawa city and consider the effectiveness of this method.