Optimal Control of Parallel Server Systems with Many Servers
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Date: 04-17-2007
Start Time:
1:00pm
End Time: 2:00pm
Speaker: Jim Dai, Georgia Institute of Technology
Location: Uris 333
ABSTRACT
We consider parallel server systems that consist of several customer classes and server pools with exponential service times. We propose a control policy that dynamically routes customers. The policy uses minimal state information; in particular, it does not require arrival rate information. In the Hafin-Whitt many-server heavy traffic regime, we show that this policy is asymptotically optimal to minimize the total linear holding and reneging costs. A key to the optimality proof is a state space collapse (SSC) result. We illustrate how a framework of Bramson (1998) can be adapted, from conventional heavy traffic to many-server heavy traffic, to prove the SSC result.
This talk is based on a joint work with Tolga Tezcan from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
BIO
Jim Dai joined Georgia Institute of Technology in 1990, where he was promoted to professor of Industrial & Systems Engineering and of Mathematics in 1998. He received the B.A. degree in 1982 and M.S. degree 1985, both from Nanjing University, and the Ph.D. degree in 1990 from Stanford University.
Jim Dai’s primary research interest is in the performance analysis and control of stochastic networks, with applications in telecommunications, semiconductor manufacturing, and service systems. In recent years, he has also been interested in supply chain management.
Jim Dai is a fellow of Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He is also a member of Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). He has served as an associate editor for Operations Research, Management of Science, Mathematics of Operations Research, and Queueing Systems. He is a founding editorial board member for Foundations and Trends in Stochastic Systems. He is also a founding associate editor for the electronic journal Probability Surverys. Currently, he is a Series Editor for Handbooks in Operations Research and Management Science, co-editing with J. K. Lenstra and G. L. Nemhauser.
Among the honors he received are NSF Young Investigator Award in 1994 by National Science Foundation, The Best Publication Award in 1997 and The Erlang Prize in 1998 both by the Applied Probability Society of INFORMS, and the 2003 IBM Faculty Award.