Empirical Design of Priority Waiting Times for Jobbing Shop Control

In many jobbing shops there exist a number of methods of increasing the capacity of machine groups. The extent of the capacity change required depends on the effect that such a change will have on the time jobs take to pass through the shop, in much the same way that the allocation of priorities both determines and is determined by the resulting waiting times. A case is put for the need to integrate these two aspects of control, and the results given of a simplified example of such control on waiting times in a single server, pre-emptive priority queue, obtained by manual sampling methods.