Throughput

It is not hard to imagine that a system produces products. In this context, we can think of a performance index for the system that answers the question ``how may products does this system produce?'' This performance index can be measured by counting the number of products produced by the system over particular time period.

If we have $x \in \mathbb{N}$ jobs produced by the system over an observational time span $t_o$ , then the system throughput $thrp$ is

$$thrp= \frac{x}{t_o}$$ (5.1)

and its unit of measurement is jobs/time-unit.

Example 5.1 (Throughput)   If the number of products produced by a system is 2500 during 100 minutes, then its throughput is $thrp$ = 2500/100 = 25 jobs/min. $\square$