THE PRIORITY PROBLEM

Priority decisions arise whenever limited facilities must be apportioned among competitive demands for service. A priority operation of contemporary interest is scheduling a time-shared computer among its concurrent users. Service requirements are not known in advance of execution. To keep response times short for small requests, service intervals are partitioned and segments are served separately in round-robin fashion. A mathematical analysis pinpoints the tradeoff between overhead and discrimination, implicit in this procedure, and allows alternate strategies to be costed. Extensions of the simple round-robin procedure are suggested, the objectives of time sharing are reviewed, and implications are drawn for the design of future priority and pricing systems. (Author) Rept. on Proj. MAC. Presented at the National Meeting of the Operations Society of America (27th), Boston, 6 May 65.