An analysis of computer operations under running time priority disciplines

Running-time priority disciplines for sequencing computer operations are those which discriminate among programs on the basis of the amount of service (running-time) they require. Discrimination is explicit in the models analyzed by Kesten and Runnenburg [1] and Miller and Schrage [2] in which the priority rule is shortest-job-first. However, in the models of particular interest in this paper, the discrimination is necessarily implicit since it is assumed that the running-times of arriving programs are not known in advance. We shall now describe in detail the queuing models to be analyzed in the following sections. Our initial description will use conventional queuing terminology; subsequently, the correspondences between this terminology and the terminology of our particular application will be established.