Regular ordering and applications in control policies (Q1610354)

This paper deals with the problem of routing customers in several queues in parallel using a softer approach. The authors did not try to compute the optimal policy, which seems to be a very hard task. Instead, they introduced the notion of regular ordering for periodic sequences based on the gaps between the entries and defined the notion of regular preserving functions using Schur convexity. This is used to extend some optimization results in queueing control problems. In particular, they showed that the maximal traveling time in a stochastic event graph as well as the transmission times in a channel with redundancy, decrease (in the stochastic sense) when the input sequence becomes more regular.