| Article ID: | iaor20041317 |
| Country: | Netherlands |
| Volume: | 41 |
| Issue: | 4 |
| Start Page Number: | 305 |
| End Page Number: | 319 |
| Publication Date: | Aug 2002 |
| Journal: | Queueing Systems |
| Authors: | Righter Rhonda |
| Keywords: | scheduling, networks, programming: dynamic |
We consider general feed-forward networks of queues with deterministic service times and arbitrary arrival processes. There are holding costs at each queue, idling may or may not be permitted, and servers may fail. We partially characterize the optimal policy and give conditions under which lower priority should be given to jobs that would be delayed later in the network if they were processed now.