A heuristic rule for routing customers to parallel servers

A practically important problem is the assignment of stochastically arriving service requests to one of several parallel service groups so as to minimize the long-run average sojourn time per service request. An exact solution of this multi-dimensional optimization problem is computationally infeasible. A simple heuristic solution method yielding a good suboptimal rule will be given for the case of server groups with different and generally distributed service times. This solution method is based on a decomposition approach and first principles from Markov decision theory. The main idea of the heuristic method is to apply one step of policy improvement to the best Bernoulli-splitting rule