Abstract
Service systems often face task-server assignment constraints because of skill-based routing or geographical conditions. Redundancy scheduling responds to this limited flexibility by replicating tasks to specific servers in agreement with these assignment constraints. We gain insight from product-form stationary distributions and weak local stability conditions to establish a state space collapse in heavy traffic. In this limiting regime, the parallel-server system with redundancy scheduling operates as a multiclass single-server system, achieving full resource pooling and exhibiting strong insensitivity to the underlying assignment constraints. In particular, the performance of a fully flexible (unconstrained) system can be matched even with rather strict assignment constraints.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1539-1555 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| Journal | Operations Research |
| Volume | 72 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| Early online date | 5 Dec 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Jul 2024 |
Funding
Funding: The work of S. Borst was partly supported by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) through Gravitation [Grant NETWORKS-024.002.003]. The work of J. S. H. van Leeuwaarden was partly supported by VICI [Grant 202.068]. Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2385.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek | NETWORKS-024.002.003, 202.068 |
Keywords
- assignment constraints
- heavy-traffic limit
- heterogeneity
- load balancing
- parallel-server systems
- redundancy scheduling
- resource pooling
- state space collapse