OPTIMAL PRIORITY ASSIGNMENT WITH HETEROGENEOUS WAITING COSTS.

For an M/G/1 queueing system, this paper assumes tha the discipline is administratively constrained to a 'head-of-the-line' rule with n classes, and that priorities are centrally assigned to customers according to their individual cost per unit time spent in the system, or their individual service-time requirements, or both (as the available information may be), but independently of the state of the queue. Then optimal priority-assignment rules for the various information structures are characterized.