Influencing factors of job waiting time variance on a single machine

When a batch of jobs are waiting for services from a machine or resource, sometimes it is desirable to minimise the variance of job waiting times Waiting Time Variance (WTV) for service stability to all the jobs in the batch so that the jobs have about the same waiting times. Many factors, including the sum of the jobs’ processing times, the probability distribution of job processing times and the scheduling method may influence the variance of job waiting times. In this paper, we use multivariate exploratory techniques such as Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Correspondence Analysis (CA) along with other statistical analysis techniques to investigate these factors. We prove that the expected WTV can be predicted given characteristics of the jobs. These findings can be applied to achieve a desire level of WTV for service stability.