THE POWER-SERIES ALGORITHM FOR POLLING SYSTEMS WITH TIME LIMITS

This paper deals with evaluation and optimization of palling systems w ith time limits. Performance measures are evaluated with the power-ser ies algorithm, a flexible technique for computing performance measures for multiqueue systems. The constant time limits are approximated by Erlang distributed variables. The algorithm is extended to compute der ivatives of performance measures. This allows for optimization of cost functions with respect to the mean values of the time limits by gradi ent methods. Several properties of the optimal time limits are reveale d by the numerical solution of various optimization problems.