dc.contributor |
Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Departament d'Economia i Empresa |
dc.contributor.author |
Niño-Mora, José |
dc.date |
1998-03-01 |
dc.identifier.citation |
https://econ-papers.upf.edu/ca/paper.php?id=276 |
dc.identifier.uri |
http://hdl.handle.net/10230/621 |
dc.format |
application/pdf |
dc.language.iso |
eng |
dc.relation |
Economics and Business Working Papers Series; 276 |
dc.rights |
L'accés als continguts d'aquest document queda condicionat a l'acceptació de les condicions d'ús establertes per la següent llicència Creative Commons |
dc.rights |
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
dc.rights |
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ |
dc.subject |
throughput-wip (work-in-process) optimal queueing control |
dc.subject |
threshold optimality |
dc.subject |
achievable performance region |
dc.subject |
Operations Management |
dc.title |
On the throughput-WIP trade-off in queueing systems, diminishing returns and the threshold property : a linear programming approach |
dc.type |
info:eu-repo/semantics/workingPaper |
dc.description.abstract |
We present a new unifying framework for investigating throughput-WIP
(Work-in-Process) optimal control problems in queueing systems,
based on reformulating them as linear programming (LP) problems with
special structure: We show that if a throughput-WIP performance pair
in a stochastic system satisfies the Threshold Property we introduce
in this paper, then we can reformulate the problem of optimizing a
linear objective of throughput-WIP performance as a (semi-infinite)
LP problem over a polygon with special structure (a threshold
polygon). The strong structural properties of such polygones explain
the optimality of threshold policies for optimizing linear
performance objectives: their vertices correspond to the performance
pairs of threshold policies. We analyze in this framework the
versatile input-output queueing intensity control model introduced by
Chen and Yao (1990), obtaining a variety of new results, including (a)
an exact reformulation of the control problem as an LP problem over a
threshold polygon; (b) an analytical characterization of the Min WIP
function (giving the minimum WIP level required to attain a target
throughput level); (c) an LP Value Decomposition Theorem that relates
the objective value under an arbitrary policy with that of a given
threshold policy (thus revealing the LP interpretation of Chen and
Yao's optimality conditions); (d) diminishing returns and invariance
properties of throughput-WIP performance, which underlie threshold
optimality; (e) a unified treatment of the time-discounted and
time-average cases. |