# Math Help - help sharing settings accurately.

1. ## help sharing settings accurately.

Hi, i will try and explain this problem as simply as i can, its giving me quite a headache.

Im trying to share settings for a machine equally across three sectors i will call them. Each sector has its own preferred setting however the machine runs all three sectors at once so an average setting must be found.

To further complicate matters each sector lasts for different lengths of time. So some sectors need more priority more than others when it comes to the average. For example.

The run of the machine takes 95 secs
Sector 1 = 8 secs
Sector 2 = 66.3 secs
Sector 3 = 20.5 secs

The settings on a scale of 1-100 for each sector are as follows.
Sector 1 = 24
Sector 2 = 91
Sector 3 = 37

I know the average of the settings would be 50.6 however i want it to accurately show priority to each sector based on the time taken. Im a completely confused.

2. Originally Posted by bryman
Hi, i will try and explain this problem as simply as i can, its giving me quite a headache.

Im trying to share settings for a machine equally across three sectors i will call them. Each sector has its own preferred setting however the machine runs all three sectors at once so an average setting must be found.

To further complicate matters each sector lasts for different lengths of time. So some sectors need more priority more than others when it comes to the average. For example.

The run of the machine takes 95 secs
Sector 1 = 8 secs
Sector 2 = 66.3 secs
Sector 3 = 20.5 secs

The settings on a scale of 1-100 for each sector are as follows.
Sector 1 = 24
Sector 2 = 91
Sector 3 = 37

I know the average of the settings would be 50.6 however i want it to accurately show priority to each sector based on the time taken. Im a completely confused.

I think you're looking for a weighted average (although I'm not 100% sure of what you're doing) basically try to multiply each of the sector values by the proportion of the total time they require then add, thus you would have:

$\frac{8}{94.8}24+\frac{66.3}{94.8}91+\frac{20.5}{9 4.8}37\approx73.6688$

Hope that's of some help to you.