Polling: past,present, and perspective

This is a survey on polling systems, focussing on the basic single-server multi-queue polling system in which the server visits the queues in cyclic order. The main goals of the paper are: (i) to discuss a number of the key methodologies in analyzing polling models; (ii) to give an overview of recent polling developments; and (iii) to present a number of challenging open problems.     

Comments on: Polling: past,present and perspective

In their exposé on the past, present and perspective of the analysis of polling systems, professors Borst and Boxma give a first-hand account on the advancement of this particular research field. As any good historical account, the paper highlights some of the key turning points in the advancement of our current understanding of the dynamics of polling systems. Their paper, however, goes far beyond a classical literature review, as it also emphasises recent developments and points to many open problems. In the first section of this present note, we give some introductory comments on polling systems and queueing systems in general, followed by a discussion of Borst and Boxma’s survey of the past and the present in Sect. 2. Finally, we discuss some of their suggestions for further research in Sect. 3.     

Ethics in OR/MS: past,present and future

The pervasiveness and impact on society and on every day human life of technology has led to a growing awareness that science and technology cannot be considered above or beyond the realm of value judgements and hence of ethics. This is especially true for Operations Research/Management Science (OR/MS), that particular science which is concerned with methodologies for scientifically deciding how to design and operate man-machine systems in an optimal way, usually under conditions requiring the allocation of scarce resources. Here we try to give a historical account of the growing interest for ethics within the OR/MS community from its birth to present days. Starting from attempts to define models and codes of ethical behaviour in our profession, the OR/MS community has arrived at more fundamental questions about the ethical responsibility it faces in a world of growing inequalities and in which the ever greater stress that human activities impose on the environment puts at risk the very survival of human kind. This paper appeared in 4OR 2, 95–110, 2004.     

Second-order functional differential equations with past, present and future dependence

In this paper we obtain a result on existence of extremal quasisolutions and solutions for second-order functional differential equations with functional boundary conditions and past, present and future dependence. In order to do that, we develop a generalized monotone method in presence of lower and upper solutions. Some examples of application are provided too.     

Evolution of symbiosis in hermatypic corals: A model of the past,present, and future

This work can be considered a prequel to our previous paper on coral bleaching induced by global warming. We once again investigate, using Finsler geometry, dynamical energy budget theory and nonlinear modular mechanics, the origin of endosymbiosis, between reef-building corals and the algae. We assume their relationship starts out as entosymbiosis, with the algal organism living on the external surfaces of host coral exoskeleton, but with both gradually adapting to each other over evolutionary time-scales. Our main conclusion is that such an evolutionary conversion is possible and indeed is quite likely.     

Polling and greedy servers on a line

A single server moves with speed on a line interval (or a circle) of length (circumference)L. Customers, requiring service of constant durationb, arrive on the interval (or circle) at random at mean rate customers per unit length per unit time. A customer's mean wait for service depends partly on the rules governing the server's motion. We compare two different servers: thepolling server and thegreedy server. Without knowing the locations of waiting customers, a polling server scans endlessly back and forth across the interval (or clockwise around the circle), stopping only where it encounters a waiting customer. Knowing where customers are waiting, a greedy server always travels toward the current nearest one. Except for certain extreme values of ,L, b, and, the polling and greedy servers are roughly equally effective. Indeed, the simpler polling server is often the better. Theoretical results show, in most cases, that the polling server has a high probability of moving toward the nearest customer, i.e. moving as a greedy server would. The greedy server is difficult to analyze, but was simulated on a computer.     

Optimal Open-Loop Control of Vacations,Polling and Service Assignment

We consider in this paper the optimal open-loop control of vacations in queueing systems. The controller has to take actions without state information. We first consider the case of a single queue, in which the question is when should vacations be taken so as to minimize, in some general sense, workloads and waiting times. We then consider the case of several queues, in which service of one queue constitutes a vacation for others. This is the optimal polling problem. We solve both problems using new techniques from [2,4] based on multimodularity.     

Polling systems and multitype branching processes

The joint queue length process in polling systems with and without switchover times is studied. If the service discipline in each queue satisfies a certain property it is shown that the joint queue length process at polling instants of a fixed queue is a multitype branching process (MTBP) with immigration. In the case of polling models with switchover times, it turns out that we are dealing with an MTBP with immigration in each state, whereas in the case of polling models without switchover times we are dealing with an MTBP with immigration in state zero. The theory of MTBPs leads to expressions for the generating function of the joint queue length process at polling instants. Sufficient conditions for ergodicity and moment calculations are also given.This work was done while the author was at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.     

Weak convergence of the past and future of Brownian motion given the present

In this paper, we show that for t > 0, the joint distribution of the past {W _t?s : 0 ≤ s ≤ t} and the future {W _{t + s} :s ≥ 0} of a d-dimensional standard Brownian motion (W _s ), conditioned on {W _t ∈ U}, where U is a bounded open set in ? ^d , converges weakly in C[0,∞)×C[0,∞) as t→∞. The limiting distribution is that of a pair of coupled processes Y + B ¹,Y + B ² where Y,B ¹,B ² are independent, Y is uniformly distributed on U and B ¹,B ² are standard d-dimensional Brownian motions. Let σ _t ,d _t be respectively, the last entrance time before time t into the set U and the first exit time after t from U. When the boundary of U is regular, we use the continuous mapping theorem to show that the limiting distribution as t → ∞ of the four dimensional vector with components \((W_{\sigma _{t}},t-\sigma _{t},W_{d_{t}},d_{t}-t)\), conditioned on {W _t ∈U}, is the same as that of the four dimensional vector whose components are the place and time of first exit from U of the processes Y + B ¹ and Y + B ² respectively.