Integrating User Preferences and Real-Time Workload in Information Services
Authors: Konana, Prabhudev; Gupta, Alok; Whinston, Andrew B.
Journal: Information Systems Research (2000)
DOI: 10.1287/isre.11.2.177.11781
<jats:p> We propose priority pricing as an on-line adaptive resource scheduling mechanism to manage real-time databases within organizations. These databases provide timely information for delay sensitive users. The proposed approach allows diverse users to optimize their own objectives while collectively maximizing organizational benefits. We rely on economic principles to derive priority prices by modeling the fixed-capacity real-time database environment as an economic system. Each priority is associated with a price and a delay, and the price is the premium (congestion toll resulting from negative externalities) for accessing the database. At optimality, the prices are equal to the aggregate delay cost imposed on all other users of the database. These priority prices are used to control admission and to schedule user jobs in the database system. The database monitors the arrival processes and the state of the system, and incrementally adjusts the prices to regulate the flow. Because our model ignores the operational intricacies of the real-time databases (e.g., intermediate queues at the CPU and disks, memory size, etc.) to maintain analytical tractability, we evaluate the per…