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A heuristic rule for routing customers to parallel servers

Author

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  • S. A. E. Sassen
  • H. C. Tijms
  • R. D. Nobel

Abstract

A practically important problem is the assignment of stochastically arriving service requests to one of several parallel service groups so as to minimize the long‐run average sojourn time per service request. An exact solution of this multi‐dimensional optimization problem is computationally infeasible. A simple heuristic solution method yielding a good suboptimal rule will be given for the case of server groups with different and generally distributed service times. This solution method is based on a decomposition approach and first principles from Markov decision theory. The main idea of the heuristic method is to apply one step of policy improvement to the best Bernoulli‐splitting rule.

Suggested Citation

  • S. A. E. Sassen & H. C. Tijms & R. D. Nobel, 1997. "A heuristic rule for routing customers to parallel servers," Statistica Neerlandica, Netherlands Society for Statistics and Operations Research, vol. 51(1), pages 107-121, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:bla:stanee:v:51:y:1997:i:1:p:107-121
    DOI: 10.1111/1467-9574.00040
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    Cited by:

    1. I. Adan & O. Boxma, 2007. "Comments on: Dynamic priority allocation via restless bandit marginal productivity indices," TOP: An Official Journal of the Spanish Society of Statistics and Operations Research, Springer;Sociedad de Estadística e Investigación Operativa, vol. 15(2), pages 199-201, December.
    2. Hyytiä, Esa & Penttinen, Aleksi & Aalto, Samuli, 2012. "Size- and state-aware dispatching problem with queue-specific job sizes," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 217(2), pages 357-370.
    3. Rob Shone & Vincent A. Knight & Paul R. Harper, 2020. "A conservative index heuristic for routing problems with multiple heterogeneous service facilities," Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR);Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB), vol. 92(3), pages 511-543, December.
    4. Coolen, F. P. A. & Coolen-Schrijner, P., 2003. "A nonparametric predictive method for queues," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 145(2), pages 425-442, March.

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