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Using aggregation to construct periodic policies for routing jobs to parallel servers with deterministic service times

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Abstract

The problem of routing deterministic arriving jobs to parallel servers with deterministic service times, when the job arrival rate equals the total service capacity, requires finding a periodic routing policy. Because there exist no efficient exact procedures to minimize the long-run average waiting time of arriving jobs, heuristics to construct periodic policies have been proposed. This paper presents an aggregation approach that combines servers with the same service rate, constructs a policy for the aggregated system, and then disaggregates this policy into a feasible policy for the original system. Computational experiments show that using aggregation not only reduces average waiting time but also reduces computational effort.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. A. James Clark School of Engineering, University of Maryland, 2181 Martin Hall, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Jeffrey W. Herrmann

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  1. Jeffrey W. Herrmann
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Correspondence to Jeffrey W. Herrmann.

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Herrmann, J.W. Using aggregation to construct periodic policies for routing jobs to parallel servers with deterministic service times. J Sched 15, 181–192 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-010-0209-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-010-0209-6

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