Bounding Mean Throughput Rate and Mean Delay in Office Systems

Offices handle a mix of jobs, with each job consisting of one or more steps. The fundamental ingredients in performance analysis are the job arrival statistics, the service required for each job step, and a scheduling policy, for a given equipment configuration. The approach is hierarchical and can be refined in numerous ways; here the authors focus on a mean value analysis: the inputs are the mean times required to execute each step of each job. A series of examples illustrate how these ingredients can be used to upper bound the mean throughput rate and lower bound the mean delay associated with each job type.