Conservation Laws and Related Applications

Abstract

Work conservation is a fundamental invariance principle governing the behavior of a wide variety of queueing systems. In certain queueing models, the work conservation principle yields work conservation laws, which are linear constraints on performance measures that give an exact or relaxed linear programming formulation of the region of achievable performance spanned under admissible scheduling policies. Such laws are useful for exact or approximate performance analyses of such models, as well as for design and computation of optimal or nearly optimal scheduling policies relative to given performance objectives.