Fixed-time schedules for the processing of jobs when service completions are not observable

K.D. Glazebrook () and E.L. Punton

Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, 2005, vol. 62, issue 1, 77-97

Abstract: We argue the importance of studying service systems in which the successful completion of job/customer service cannot be observed contemporaneously. Military and other applications are cited. The allocation of a large amount of processing to a job may make its (unobservable) successful completion more likely but will impose a burden on other jobs awaiting service. A fixed-time schedule specifies both the order in which jobs should be processed and how much processing each should receive. The goal is to find schedules which maximise the total expected reward earned from all jobs served. While this problem is intractable in general, a range of characterisations of optimal fixed-time schedules is achieved for given scenarios. The development of effective heuristics is also discussed. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005

Keywords: Gittins index; restless bandit; stochastic dynamic programming; stochastic scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2005
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00186-005-0442-5 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:mathme:v:62:y:2005:i:1:p:77-97

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/00186

DOI: 10.1007/s00186-005-0442-5

Access Statistics for this article

Mathematical Methods of Operations Research is currently edited by Oliver Stein

More articles in Mathematical Methods of Operations Research from Springer, Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR), Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().