The Transient Cost of Learning in Queueing Systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Freund, Daniel, Lykouris, Thodoris, Weng, Wentao
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2023
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author Freund, Daniel
Lykouris, Thodoris
Weng, Wentao
author_facet Freund, Daniel
Lykouris, Thodoris
Weng, Wentao
contents Queueing systems are widely applicable stochastic models with use cases in communication networks, healthcare, service systems, etc. Although their optimal control has been extensively studied, most existing approaches assume perfect knowledge of the system parameters. This assumption rarely holds in practice where there is parameter uncertainty, thus motivating a recent line of work on bandit learning for queueing systems. This nascent stream of research focuses on the asymptotic performance of the proposed algorithms but does not provide insight on the transient performance in the early stages of the learning process. In this paper, we propose the Transient Cost of Learning in Queueing (TCLQ), a new metric that quantifies the maximum increase in time-averaged queue length caused by parameter uncertainty. We characterize the TCLQ of a single-queue multi-server system, and then extend these results to multi-queue multi-server systems and networks of queues. In establishing our results, we propose a unified analysis framework for TCLQ that bridges Lyapunov and bandit analysis, provides guarantees for a wide range of algorithms, and could be of independent interest.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_07817
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The Transient Cost of Learning in Queueing Systems
Freund, Daniel
Lykouris, Thodoris
Weng, Wentao
Machine Learning
Data Structures and Algorithms
Performance
Probability
Queueing systems are widely applicable stochastic models with use cases in communication networks, healthcare, service systems, etc. Although their optimal control has been extensively studied, most existing approaches assume perfect knowledge of the system parameters. This assumption rarely holds in practice where there is parameter uncertainty, thus motivating a recent line of work on bandit learning for queueing systems. This nascent stream of research focuses on the asymptotic performance of the proposed algorithms but does not provide insight on the transient performance in the early stages of the learning process. In this paper, we propose the Transient Cost of Learning in Queueing (TCLQ), a new metric that quantifies the maximum increase in time-averaged queue length caused by parameter uncertainty. We characterize the TCLQ of a single-queue multi-server system, and then extend these results to multi-queue multi-server systems and networks of queues. In establishing our results, we propose a unified analysis framework for TCLQ that bridges Lyapunov and bandit analysis, provides guarantees for a wide range of algorithms, and could be of independent interest.
title The Transient Cost of Learning in Queueing Systems
topic Machine Learning
Data Structures and Algorithms
Performance
Probability
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.07817