University of Newcastle upon Tyne

School of Mathematics and Statistics

Statistics Seminars 2004-2005

29 October 2004, M414, 2:00pm or 3:00pm

Dr Phil Ansell

Abstract

Service is often provided in contexts where tasks or customers are impatient or perishable in that they have natural lifetimes of availability for useful service. Moreover, these lifetimes are usually unknown to the service provider. The question of how service might be allocated to the currently waiting tasks or customers in such a context has been neglected and three simple models are proposed. For each model, an index heuristic is developed and is assessed numerically. In all cases the heuristic comes close to optimality.

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