Journal of Systems Engineering and Electronics ›› 2022, Vol. 33 ›› Issue (1): 144-155.doi: 10.23919/JSEE.2022.000015

• SYSTEMS ENGINEERING • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Optimal policy for controlling two-server queueing systems with jockeying

Bing LIN1,*(), Yuchen LIN2(), Rohit BHATNAGAR3()   

  1. 1 School of Business, Jiangsu Normal University, Xuzhou 221116, China
    2 Wenzheng College, Soochow University, Suzhou 215104, China
    3 Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Nanyang 639798, Singapore
  • Received:2020-10-19 Accepted:2021-12-27 Online:2022-01-18 Published:2022-02-22
  • Contact: Bing LIN E-mail:linbing_jsnu@163.com;yclin_ee@163.com;arbhatnagar@ntu.edu.sg
  • About author:|LIN Bing was born in 1969. He received his B.S. degree from Fudan University in 1992, MBA from Tsinghua University in 2003, and Ph.D. degree in operations management from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore in 2008. Currently, he is a lecturer in Jiangsu Normal University. His research interests are modeling and optimization of queueing systems, production/inventory systems, and supply chain systems. E-mail: linbing_jsnu@163.com||LIN Yuchen was born in 2000. She is currently an undergraduate student in electrical engineering at the Wenzheng College of Soochow University. She has publications on logistics technology and logistics science and technology. Her research interests are wireless charging technology, smart logistics system, and machine learning. E-mail: yclin_ee@163.com||BHATNAGAR Rohit was born in 1960. He received his B.Tech. degree from Indian Institute of Technology (BHU), India in 1983, MBA from the India Institute of Management, Bangalore, India in 1985, and Ph.D. degree in operations management from McGill University, Canada in 1994. Currently, he is an associate professor in Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. His research interests are design and planning of manufacturing and supply chain systems. E-mail: arbhatnagar@ntu.edu.sg
  • Supported by:
    This work was supported by the National Social Science Fund of China (19BGL100).

Abstract:

This paper studies the optimal policy for joint control of admission, routing, service, and jockeying in a queueing system consisting of two exponential servers in parallel. Jobs arrive according to a Poisson process. Upon each arrival, an admission/routing decision is made, and the accepted job is routed to one of the two servers with each being associated with a queue. After each service completion, the servers have an option of serving a job from its own queue, serving a jockeying job from another queue, or staying idle. The system performance is inclusive of the revenues from accepted jobs, the costs of holding jobs in queues, the service costs and the job jockeying costs. To maximize the total expected discounted return, we formulate a Markov decision process (MDP) model for this system. The value iteration method is employed to characterize the optimal policy as a hedging point policy. Numerical studies verify the structure of the hedging point policy which is convenient for implementing control actions in practice.

Key words: queueing system, jockeying, optimal policy, Markov decision process (MDP), dynamic programming