Do you dislike waiting in line? A supermarket chain has used computer simulation and information technology to reduce the average waiting time for customers at 2,300 stores. Using a new system, which allows the supermarket to better predict when shoppers will be checking out, the company was able to decrease average customer waiting time to just 23 seconds. (a) Assume that supermarket waiting times are exponentially distributed. Show the probability density function of waiting time at the supermarket. f(x) = , x ≥ 0 , elsewhere (b) What is the probability that a customer will have to wait between 30 and 45 seconds? (Round your answer to four decimal places.) (c) What is the probability that a customer will have to wait more than 2 minutes? (Round your answer to four decimal places.)
Continuous Probability Distributions
Probability distributions are of two types, which are continuous probability distributions and discrete probability distributions. A continuous probability distribution contains an infinite number of values. For example, if time is infinite: you could count from 0 to a trillion seconds, billion seconds, so on indefinitely. A discrete probability distribution consists of only a countable set of possible values.
Normal Distribution
Suppose we had to design a bathroom weighing scale, how would we decide what should be the range of the weighing machine? Would we take the highest recorded human weight in history and use that as the upper limit for our weighing scale? This may not be a great idea as the sensitivity of the scale would get reduced if the range is too large. At the same time, if we keep the upper limit too low, it may not be usable for a large percentage of the population!
|
|
x ≥ 0 |
|
|
elsewhere |
Trending now
This is a popular solution!
Step by step
Solved in 3 steps with 3 images
