On page 17, lines 13-14, it says “In general, the manager prioritizes the waiters in descending number of cooked meals in the kitchen that belong to their assigned tables.”. Does this not hinder waiters with little to no meals to serve, while overloading waiters with large amounts of workload? Please correct me if I understand something wrong.
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Your reading treats the sentence as a work-assignment rule; it’s only an ordering rule.
A waiter can only serve meals at tables assigned to them. So a waiter with few or no cooked meals isn’t being passed over, they have nothing to serve. The sentence merely decides who acts first among the waiters who do have ready meals; it never moves a table from one waiter to another.
The purpose of descending-cooked-meals is throughput: serve first where the most food is already sitting in the kitchen, since food arriving late makes the group’s experience negative.
Thank you very much for the answer.