Robustness of efficient server assignment policies to service time distributions in finite‐buffered lines

We study the assignment of flexible servers to stations in tandem lines with service times that are not necessarily exponentially distributed. Our goal is to achieve optimal or near‐optimal throughput. For systems with infinite buffers, it is already known that the effective assignment of flexible servers is robust to the service time distributions. We provide analytical results for small systems and numerical results for larger systems that support the same conclusion for tandem lines with finite buffers. In the process, we propose server assignment heuristics that perform well for systems with different service time distributions. Our research suggests that policies known to be optimal or near‐optimal for Markovian systems are also likely to be effective when used to assign servers to tasks in non‐Markovian systems. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Naval Research Logistics, 2010