Preemptive Priority Queues

Abstract

Customers of different priorities arrive at a counter in accordance with a Poisson process. The customers are served by a single server in order of priority and for each priority in order of arrival. Preemptive discipline is assumed. Three service policies are considered: (i) preemptive-resume, (ii) preemptive-repeat-identical, and (iii) preemptive-repeat-different. The time-dependent solutions for these priority systems are very complicated. However, the problem can be simplified in case of stationary solutions. In this paper, a step-by-step method is proposed to find the stationary distributions of the queue sizes, the waiting times, and the busy periods of each priority class.