A Constrained Bandit Approach for Online Dispatching

Online dispatching refers to the process (or an algorithm) that dispatches incoming jobs to available servers in realtime. The problem arises in many different fields. Examples include routing customer calls to representatives in a call center, assigning patients towards in a hospital, dispatching goods to different shipping companies, scheduling packets over multiple frequency channels in wireless communications, routing search queries to servers in a data center, selecting an advertisement to display to an Internet user, and allocating jobs to workers in crowdsourcing.