Question

A new airport in Tucson, Arizona has decided to use robots in their automated luggage handling system. One robot can handle 240 bags per hour (effective capacity). They operate at 90% efficiency, 365 days out of the year for 20 hours every day. How many robots will be needed to handle 3.8 million bags a year?

Answer 1

To handle 3.8 million bags a year, 3 robots will be needed.

Step-by-step explanation:

To calculate the number of robots needed to handle 3.8 million bags a year, we need to find the total number of bags that can be handled by one robot in a year.

Given that one robot can handle 240 bags per hour and operates at 90% efficiency for 20 hours a day, the number of bags handled by one robot in a day is:

240 bags/hour x 20 hours/day x 0.9 efficiency = 4,320 bags/day.

To find the number of bags handled by one robot in a year:

4,320 bags/day x 365 days/year = 1,576,800 bags/year.

Therefore, to handle 3.8 million bags a year, we divide the total number of bags by the number of bags handled by one robot in a year:

3.8 million bags / 1,576,800 bags/year = 2.41 robots.

Since we cannot have a fraction of a robot, we would need 3 robots to handle 3.8 million bags a year.