Suppose that an activity consists of a two events such that one begins at and the other ends at . Then the activity duration is . If we have activity data as a set of time pairs where is in some index set, , then the (average) cycle time is
Cycle time can be interpreted in different contexts. For example,
in the system which consists of a buffer and a processor as shown
in Figure 4.1, the system time can be
measured over the entire processing activity from arrival to
departure of the BufferProcessor
system. Also
waiting time can be considered as the time duration for
the waiting activity in Buffer
, while processing
time can be the time duration between arrival to and departure
from Processor
.
BufferProcessor
system in Figure 4.1. Then the
system time is