We propose priority pricing as an on-line adaptive resource scheduling mech
anism to manage real-time databases within organizations. These databases p
rovide timely information for delay sensitive users. The proposed approach
allows diverse users to optimize their own objectives while collectively ma
ximizing organizational benefits. We rely on economic principles to derive
priority prices by modeling the fixed-capacity real-time database environme
nt as an economic system. Each priority is associated with a price and a de
lay, and the price is the premium (congestion toll resulting from negative
externalities) for accessing the database. At optimality, the prices are eq
ual to the aggregate delay cost imposed on all other users of the database.
These priority prices are used to control admission and to schedule user j
obs in the database system. The database monitors the arrival processes and
the state of the system, and incrementally adjusts the prices to regulate
the flow. Because our model ignores the operational intricacies of the real
-time databases (e.g., intermediate queues at the CPU and disks, memory siz
e, etc.) to maintain analytical tractability, we evaluate the performance o
f our pricing approach through simulation. We evaluate the database perform
ance using both the traditional real-time database performance metrics (e.g
., the number of jobs serviced on time, average tardiness) and the economic
benefits (e.g., benefits to the organization). The simulation results, und
er various database workload parameters, show that our priority pricing mec
hanism not only maximizes organizational benefits but also outperforms in a
ll aspects of traditional performance measures compared to frequently used
database scheduling techniques, such as first-come-first-served, earliest d
eadline first and least slack first.