Suppose that a fire department receives an average of 24 requests for fire engines each hour, and that these requests occur according to a Poisson process. Each request causes a fire engine to be...

Suppose that a fire department receives an average of 24 requests for fire engines each hour, and that these requests occur according to a Poisson process. Each request causes a fire engine to be unavailable for an average of 20 minutes. To have at least a 99% chance of being able to respond to a request, how many fire engines should the fire department have?

Objective To use the Erlang loss model to find an appropriate number of fire engines so that one is almost always available.