Heavy-traffic universality of redundancy systems with assignment constraints

Abstract

Service systems often face task-server assignment-constraints due to 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 multi-class 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