Guidelines for the design of flexibility in queueing systems : model, measures, and analysis

(cont.) have a relatively limited impact on throughput and overall utilization measures when compared to strategic flexibility design parameters such as the assignment of long-term job responsibilities to servers. However, we show that this influence on performance is significant enough that various flexibility design alternatives are better compared after taking into account the control policy that will be used to operate the system. Furthermore, and motivated by the recent interest in revenue management techniques for operational systems, we show that such operational control policies can have disproportionate influence on revenue and cost measures of performance; this fact further underscores the importance of having such models, measures, and analytical tools to examine various system design alternatives for improving performance.