Martin, S. P. and Mitrani, I. and Glazebrook, Kevin D. (2005) Dynamic routing among several intermittently available servers. In: Next Generation Internet Networks, 2005 :. IEEE, pp. 1-8. ISBN 0-7803-8900-X
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
We examine the problem of how best to route jobs among a number of queues whose servers are subject to random periods of unavailability. The optimal routing policy is computed by modelling the system as a discrete-time, finite-state Markov decision process and solving the resulting dynamic programming equations. In a series of numerical experiments, the performance of various heuristic policies is compared with that of the optimal policy. A particular heuristic, using an 'index policy', is shown to be close to optimal.