Find the probability that the second customer to arrive has to wait to be served if arrival time is exponential and serving time is uniform

1.6k Views Asked by At

Customers line up to be serviced according to a Poisson process at an average rate of five per hour. If the time it takes to serve one customer is a continuous uniform random variable on $[0,4]$, independent of arrival times, what is the probability that the second customer who arrives will have to wait to be served?

I'm really rather lost I think. I'm saying the time $T_n$ that the $n$th customer arrives is a sum of exponential variables with parameter 5, which ends up being a Gamma distribution with parameters $n, 5$. The time that it takes to serve the $n$th customer is $S\sim U(0,4)$. I figure that the second customer waits whenever $T_1+S>T_2$, so that's the probability that I'm looking for. The problem is, I don't know how to find that probability. I tried taking the convolution of $S$ and $T_1$ to get the distribution function of $T_1 +S$ but something seems to be going wrong with that:

$$F_{T_1+S}(a)=\int_{-\infty}^{\infty}F_{T_{1}}(a-y)f_{S}(y)dy=\frac{1}{4}\int_{0}^{4}(1-e^{-5(a-y)})dy \\ =\frac{1}{4}(4-\frac{1}{5}e^{-5a}[e^{20}-1])$$ which is clearly not a CDF (it's negative between $0$ and $4$), so I must have done that wrong. But even if I figure out what I did wrong there, I wouldn't know what to do next.

1

There are 1 best solutions below

3
On BEST ANSWER

Hint: $T_2=T_1+R$ with $R$ independent of $T_1$ and $S$, and $[T_1+S\gt T_2]=[S\gt R]$.

Sub-hint: $\mathrm P(R\gt S)=\int\limits_0^4\mathrm P(R\gt s)\,\frac{\mathrm ds}4$ and $\mathrm P(R\gt s)=\mathrm e^{-5s}$ for every $s\geqslant0$.