Article ID: | iaor20052838 |
Country: | United States |
Volume: | 51 |
Issue: | 5 |
Start Page Number: | 755 |
End Page Number: | 782 |
Publication Date: | Aug 2004 |
Journal: | Naval Research Logistics |
Authors: | Benjaafar Saif, Gurumurthi Suri |
Keywords: | markov processes |
We consider queuing systems with multiple classes of customers and heterogeneous servers where customers have the flexibility of being processed by more than one server and servers possess the capability of processing more than one customer class. We provide a unified framework for the modeling and analysis of these systems under arbitrary customer and server flexibility and for a rich set of control policies that includes customer/server-specific priority schemes for server and customer selection. We use our models to generate several insights into the effect of system configuration and control policies. In particular, we examine the relationship between flexibility, control policies and throughput under varying asssumptions for system parameters.