Article ID: | iaor1994353 |
Country: | Germany |
Volume: | 37 |
Start Page Number: | 187 |
End Page Number: | 205 |
Publication Date: | May 1993 |
Journal: | Mathematical Methods of Operations Research (Heidelberg) |
Authors: | Rieder U., Friis S.-H., Weishaupt J. |
Keywords: | programming: dynamic, control |
A general single-server queueing network model is considered. It is well-known that an optimal policy is determined by the largest-index policy. There is an index for each given queue and one allocates the server to a queue with largest current index. Using discounted dynamic programming the authors give a new and short proof of this result and derive some characterizations and bounds of the indices. Moreover, it is shown that an approximate largest-index policy yields an approximately optimal policy. These results lead to efficient methods for computing the indices. In particular, the authors present a general largest-remaining-index method.