According to Wardrop's first principle, agents in a congested network choose their routes selfishly, a behavior that is captured by the Nash equilibrium of the underlying noncooperative game. A Nash equilibrium does not optimize any global criterion per se, and so there is no apparent reason why...

We address the problem of scheduling a multiclass queueing network on M parallel servers to minimize the time-average holding cost. We analyze a heuristic index rule, based on Klimov’s solution to the single-server model: when a server becomes free it selects a customer with largest Klimov’s...