When Should a Roving Server Be Patient?

Mandyam M. Srinivasan and Diwakar Gupta
Additional contact information
Mandyam M. Srinivasan: Management Science Program, College of Business Administration, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-0562
Diwakar Gupta: Michael G. DeGroote School of Business, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario L8S 4M4, Canada

Management Science, 1996, vol. 42, issue 3, 437-451

Abstract: When polling systems are used to model real-world systems, it is typically assumed that the server switches continuously ("roves") even when there are no waiting jobs in the system. However, requiring the server to be patient, instead of having it rove, might be more realistic. Furthermore, operational control of these systems can be improved by knowing answers to questions like "under what circumstances should be roving server be patient?" and "at which stations?". This paper analyzes the patient server model and provides explicit expressions for the waiting time distributions, the mean waiting times and the pseudo-conservation law. Several variants of the patient server model are considered. We show that while the patient server mechanism is generally better than the roving server mechanism in the work-in-process (WIP) reduction sense, there do exist cases where roving is better. Counter-intuitive examples where reducing switchover time can increase WIP are also reported.

Keywords: polling systems; patient server mechanism; production-cyclic (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1996
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.42.3.437 (application/pdf)

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:inm:ormnsc:v:42:y:1996:i:3:p:437-451

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().