| Abstract: | We consider queueing systems with multiple classes of customers and heterogeneous servers where customers have the flexibility of being processed by more than one server and servers possess the capability of processing more than one customer class. We provide a unified framework for the modeling and analysis of these systems under arbitrary customer and server flexibility and for a rich set of control policies that includes customer/server‐specific priority schemes for server and customer selection. We use our models to generate several insights into the effect of system configuration and control policies. In particular, we examine the relationship between flexibility, control policies and throughput under varying assumptions for system parameters. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2004 |
