Systems often have two or more stages and a customer must go several stages before finalizing their service. The systems can be arranged in series or in network. Chapter 5 is dedicated specifically to the performance analysis of systems that have several stages both in series and those that have network arrangement; the theorems of Burke and Jackson are presented; the calculations of the flow and variability in a network and of the measures of performance (cycle time and work in process) are also exposed. Several codes are proposed in Scilab Language to perform calculations automatically. The chapter ends with a section devoted to identifying and analyzing the bottleneck in a system from a cost approach.
Performance Analysis of Queueing Networks via Robust Optimization
