[R] Storing business hours

[alexander.sommer at tu-dortmund.de]

Hi fellow R-users,

I am wondering about the best way to store business hours and the like in R. (Best in the sense of best for analyzing them.)

Say, I got a number of “shops”:
Shop A opens at 8am and closes at 8pm;
shop B opens at 9am, closes at 11.45am for a siesta, reopens at 1.30pm and closes at 5pm;
and so forth.

To simplify things, I would assume that closing a shop for more than two times and reopening it for more than one time is not possible. (Hoping to avoid problems with shops having multiple siestas and business hours beyond midnight this way.)

My first idea would be to plot something like an empirical distribution function for this data. (Having only shops A and B, this would be zero until 8am, 50 % from 8am to 9am, 100 % from 9am to 11.45am, 50 % again from 11.45am to 1.30pm, 100 % again from 1.30pm to 5pm, yet again 50 % from 5pm to 8pm and falling back to zero from 8pm on.) But general arithmetic should be possible, especially for building a mean over some days.

Any ideas?

Cheers,

Alex


--
Alexander Sommer
wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter

Technische Universität Dortmund
Fakultät Erziehungswissenschaft, Psychologie und Soziologie
Forschungsverbund Deutsches Jugendinstitut/Technische Universität Dortmund
Vogelpothsweg 78
44227 Dortmund

Telefon: +49 231 755-8189
Telefax: +49 231 755-6553
E-Mail:  alexander.sommer at tu-dortmund.de
WWW:     http://www.forschungsverbund.tu-dortmund.de/


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