Optimality of the Fastest Available Server Policy

Authors

William P. Millhiser, The City University of New York,
Charu Sinha, Chapman UniversityFollow
Matthew J. Sobel, Case Western Reserve University

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-1-2016

Abstract

We give sufficient conditions under which a policy that assigns customers to the Fastest Available Server, labelled FAS, is optimal in queueing models with multiple independent Poisson arrival processes and heterogeneous parallel exponential servers. The criterion is to minimize the long-run average cost per unit time. We obtain results for loss models and for queueing systems with a finite-capacity or infinite-capacity buffer under a head-of-the-line priority scheme. The results depend on cost assumptions, so we analyze the robustness of the cost structure and present counter-examples to illustrate when FAS is not optimal.

Comments

This is a pre-copy-editing, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Queueing Systems, volume 84, issue 3-4, in 2016 following peer review. The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11134-016-9502-1 and may differ from the version presented here.

Recommended Citation

Millhiser, W. P., Sinha, C., & Sobel, M. J. (2016). Optimality of the fastest available server policy. Queueing Systems, 84(3–4), 237–263. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11134-016-9502-1

Peer Reviewed

1

Copyright

Springer