HEURISTIC SCHEDULING OF PARALLEL HETEROGENEOUS QUEUES WITH SET-UPS

We consider the problem of allocating a single server to a system of q ueues with Poisson arrivals. Each queue represents a class of jobs and possesses a holding cost rate, general service distribution, and gene ral set-up time distribution. The objective is to minimize the expecte d holding cost due to the waiting of jobs. A set-up time is required t o switch from one queue to another. We provide a limited characterizat ion of the optimal policy and a simple heuristic scheduling policy for this problem. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our heuristic over a wide range of problem instances.