Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

We consider Markovian tandem queues with finite intermediate buffers and flexible servers and study how the servers should be assigned dynamically to stations in order to obtain optimal long-run average throughput. We assume that each server can work on only one job at a time, that several servers can work together on a single job, and that the travel times between stations are negligible. Under various server collaboration schemes, we characterize the optimal server assignment policy for these systems.