Heavy-Traffic Universality of Redundancy Systems with Assignment Constraints

Service systems often face task-server assignment constraints because of skill-based routing or geographical conditions. Redundancy scheduling responds to this limited flexibility by replicating tasks to specific servers in agreement with these assignment constraints. We gain insight from product-form stationary distributions and weak local stability conditions to establish a state space collapse in heavy traffic. In this limiting regime, the parallel-server system with redundancy scheduling operates as a multiclass single-server system, achieving full resource pooling and exhibiting strong insensitivity to the underlying assignment constraints. In particular, the performance of a fully flexible (unconstrained) system can be matched even with rather strict assignment constraints.

Supplemental Material: The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/opre.2022.2385.