TECHNICAL NOTE---Queueing Systems with Synergistic Servers

Authors:
Sigrún Andradóttir;Hayriye Ayhan;Douglas G. Down
Affiliations:
H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332;H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia 30332;Department of Computing and Software, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4L7, Canada
Venue:
Operations Research
Year:
2011

Citing 7
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Abstract

We consider tandem lines with finite buffers and flexible, heterogeneous servers that are synergistic in that they work more effectively in teams than on their own. Our objective is to determine how the servers should be assigned dynamically to tasks in order to maximize the long-run average throughput. In particular, we investigate when it is better to take advantage of synergy among servers, rather than exploiting the servers' special skills, to achieve the best possible system throughput. We show that when there is no trade-off between server synergy and servers' special skills (because the servers are generalists who are equally skilled at all tasks), the optimal policy has servers working in teams of two or more at all times. Moreover, for Markovian systems with two stations and two servers, we provide a complete characterization of the optimal policy and show that, depending on how well the servers work together, the optimal policy either takes full advantage of servers' special skills, or full advantage of server synergy (and hence there is no middle ground in this case). Finally, for a class of larger Markovian systems, we provide sufficient conditions that guarantee that the optimal policy should take full advantage of server synergy at all times.