Optimal Server Scheduling to Maintain Constant Customer Waiting Times

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis was to develop an analytical model that would optimally schedule commissary checkers so that the expected customer waiting-time would remain relatively constant throughout the scheduling period. A two-phase model was developed to solve the problem. The first phase of the model used dynamic programming to find the optimal number of checkers required throughout each day to meet the desired customer waiting-time goal. Since checkers cannot be scheduled to work arbitrarily short tours of duty, a second phase was needed in the model to find the optimal number of checkers to assign to allowable shifts in order to meet the optimal requirements determined in phase one. A simulation was developed to validate the checker scheduling model. It was found that the scheduling model produced acceptable results until the last few periods of the day. Additional servers needed to be added heuristically near the end of each day to obtain the desired customer waiting times. Keywords: Checker scheduling algorithm.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Dec 01, 1988
Accession Number
ADA202559

Entities

People

  • Thomas J. Frey

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Algorithms
  • Computer Programming
  • Dynamic Programming
  • Engineering
  • Integer Programming
  • Literature Surveys
  • Mathematics
  • Operating Systems
  • Operations Research
  • Probability Distributions
  • Random Variables
  • Recursive Functions
  • Simplex Method
  • Simulations
  • Standards
  • Statistics

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  • Computational Linguistics
  • Computational Modeling and Simulation
  • Enterprise Information Systems Architecture and Joint Command Capability Interoperability Support.