Article ID: | iaor1992632 |
Country: | Netherlands |
Volume: | 10 |
Issue: | 6 |
Start Page Number: | 363 |
End Page Number: | 368 |
Publication Date: | Aug 1991 |
Journal: | Operations Research Letters |
Authors: | Levy Hanoch |
Several numerical methods have been proposed in the past for calculating the expected delay in non-symmetric polling systems. However, despite the size of the corresponding numerical problems, very little effort has been devoted to analyzing the overall computational complexity of these methods. As a result, the range of practical applicability of these methods and their relative efficiency are unknown. This note analyzes Swartz's method for computing the expected delay in the discrete time, cyclic polling, exhaustive service system. It shows that the method forms a contraction mapping and, therefore, the number of iterations it requires is logarithmic in the accuracy required. The overall complexity of the method to compute the expected delay for one station is