Benefit of Flexibility in case of Machine Failures

Abstract

Flexibility in a queueing system is known to offer faster response

time. Two types of flexibility, parallel and serial flexibility, are studied in

this paper. As an extension, we deal with the case where there occur

server failures. And we show the improvement in waiting time by having

flexibility in case of server failures. In deriving the improvement of

flexibility, we apply the heavy traffic approximatin method.