640 research outputs found
Heavy-traffic analysis of k-limited polling systems
In this paper we study a two-queue polling model with zero switch-over times
and -limited service (serve at most customers during one visit period
to queue , ) in each queue. The arrival processes at the two queues
are Poisson, and the service times are exponentially distributed. By increasing
the arrival intensities until one of the queues becomes critically loaded, we
derive exact heavy-traffic limits for the joint queue-length distribution using
a singular-perturbation technique. It turns out that the number of customers in
the stable queue has the same distribution as the number of customers in a
vacation system with Erlang- distributed vacations. The queue-length
distribution of the critically loaded queue, after applying an appropriate
scaling, is exponentially distributed. Finally, we show that the two
queue-length processes are independent in heavy traffic
Waiting times in queueing networks with a single shared server
We study a queueing network with a single shared server that serves the
queues in a cyclic order. External customers arrive at the queues according to
independent Poisson processes. After completing service, a customer either
leaves the system or is routed to another queue. This model is very generic and
finds many applications in computer systems, communication networks,
manufacturing systems, and robotics. Special cases of the introduced network
include well-known polling models, tandem queues, systems with a waiting room,
multi-stage models with parallel queues, and many others. A complicating factor
of this model is that the internally rerouted customers do not arrive at the
various queues according to a Poisson process, causing standard techniques to
find waiting-time distributions to fail. In this paper we develop a new method
to obtain exact expressions for the Laplace-Stieltjes transforms of the
steady-state waiting-time distributions. This method can be applied to a wide
variety of models which lacked an analysis of the waiting-time distribution
until now
Branching-type polling systems with large setups
The present paper considers the class of polling systems that allow a multi-type branching process interpretation. This class contains the classical exhaustive and gated policies as special cases. We present an exact asymptotic analysis of the delay distribution in such systems, when the setup times tend to infinity. The motivation to study these setup time asymptotics in polling systems is based on the specific application area of base-stock policies in inventory control. Our analysis provides new and more general insights into the behavior of polling systems with large setup times. © 2009 The Author(s)
On polling systems with large setups
Polling systems with large deterministic setup times find many applications in production environments. We study the delay distribution in exhaustive polling systems when the setup times tend to infinity. Via mean value analysis a novel approach is developed to show that the scaled delay distribution converges to a uniform distribution
Monte Carlo Tree Search with Heuristic Evaluations using Implicit Minimax Backups
Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) has improved the performance of game engines
in domains such as Go, Hex, and general game playing. MCTS has been shown to
outperform classic alpha-beta search in games where good heuristic evaluations
are difficult to obtain. In recent years, combining ideas from traditional
minimax search in MCTS has been shown to be advantageous in some domains, such
as Lines of Action, Amazons, and Breakthrough. In this paper, we propose a new
way to use heuristic evaluations to guide the MCTS search by storing the two
sources of information, estimated win rates and heuristic evaluations,
separately. Rather than using the heuristic evaluations to replace the
playouts, our technique backs them up implicitly during the MCTS simulations.
These minimax values are then used to guide future simulations. We show that
using implicit minimax backups leads to stronger play performance in Kalah,
Breakthrough, and Lines of Action.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures, 9 tables, expanded version of paper presented at
IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) 2014 conferenc
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