Scheduling of multi-class single-server queues under nontraditional performance measures

We consider a multi-class production system without setups where many job c lasses share a single server. The traditional performance measure used for scheduling these systems is that of mean throughput time (i.e.. the time sp ent in the system). However, mean throughput time may not be the only measu re of importance in real systems. In particular, throughput time variance a nd the outer percentiles of throughput time may be equally important. We pr esent two heuristics for scheduling multi-class single-server queues that a re based on heavy-traffic analysis and perform well with respect to these n ontraditional measures in a wide variety of cases. An approximation is give n for the throughput time distribution under both scheduling methods.