• Calendar

March 18, Wednesday
12:00 – 14:00

Many of us are familiar with the concept of an express line (say, 1-10 products) in the supermarket. While traveling in Argentina I saw a supermarket with two express lanes, 0ne for 1-10 items and a second for 11-20 items. Imagine that we manage all the lanes in this way, each one responsible for a different range of items. In the context of computer systems, this has first been suggested and studied by Mor Harchol-Balter and her collaborators in the last 10 years. However, basic questions remained unresolved. How to determine the best range for each lane, should the first lane handle 1-8 items, 1-12 items, etc.? What will the resulting performance be and how does it compare with other methods? How does the distribution of the number of items customers purchase change the behavior of the system? We provide some answers to these and several other issues and explore future directions of research. Joint work with Hagit Sarfati.