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AN INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIALLY OPTIMAL POLICY MINIMIZING EXPECTED FLOW TIMES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2015

Sheldon M. Ross*
Affiliation:
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089, USA E-mail: smross@usc.edu

Abstract

Consider n servers having different exponential service distributions. All servers are initially busy and there are m customers waiting in queue in an ordered line. A server becoming idle is offered to the first in line, if rejected it is then offered to the second, and so on. The objective of each person in line is to minimize their expected time until service completion. We give a simple approach for finding the optimal policy and also show that this policy also minimizes the expected sum of the times the customers spend in the system.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

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