Statistical analysis of factors influencing the performance of the timeout-based testing model

Time-out collaboration protocol is a mechanism to maximize system performance, with a service discipline (or a dispatching rule) collaborated, by disabling the access of a job to the resource when the job keeps the resource idle for too long and then by giving one of the other waiting jobs the access to the resource. This paper formally defines a generic testing model with a single tester shared by multiple types of jobs and with the repair process. This research performs statistical analysis of the timeout collaboration protocol by considering several factors simultaneously and identifies two key factors that affect the performance of different timeout thresholds in the testing model. It is shown that two extreme timeout threshold values (T-0 = 0 and infinity) outperform intermediate values (0 < T-0 < infinity) with respect to overall mean flow time. This research provides insights into applying the timeout mechanism that originated from communication problems to production systems.