A practical scheduling method for multiclass production systems with setups

Consider a multiclass production system where many job classes share a sing le server and a setup time is incurred whenever the server changes class. T his paper presents a simple method for scheduling these systems that perfor ms well, not only with respect to mean waiting time, but also with respect to waiting-time variance and the outer percentiles of waiting time. The sch eduling method is dynamic and uses the ages of items in each queue, as well as the queue statistics, to decide which queue to service next.