Compression of Time in Manufacturing Systems

As data can be compressed, we inquire if time can also be compressed. In the context of manufacturing systems, time compression adopts such names as "concurrency" or "simultaneity." While it may be intuitively appealing that scaling (halving the size of a task, for example) should be linear (halving the time), such is not quite the case, as we have discovered. We report a quantitative explanation for the nonlinear behavior of time, as a function of the size of a task and the number of agents performing the task. Index Terms--Concurrency, cycle minimization, time compression, time density.