Impact of Many Capacity Units Operating in Parallel

4 Impact of Many Capacity Units Operating in Parallel 

Consider a system consisting of me independent capacity units operating in parallel, all capable of providing service to an arriving stream of orders, which are processed in order of arrival. Orders are allocated to the first available unit of capacity. Assume (as before) that the service time is exponentially distributed. The arrival of orders to the system has an interarrival time that is exponential with parameter X. As stated earlier, from a theoretical perspective, this model of order arrivals approximates the combination of many independent order sources. 

For such a system, there exist standard templates to analyze performance, such as the expected number of orders in the system, the expected lead time for an order, and so on. We will use such a template to apply the model to develop insights into the configuration of capacity. 

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