Scheduling with preemption for Incident Management: When interrupting tasks is not such a bad idea

Large IT service providers comprise hundreds or even thousands of system administrators to handle customers´ IT infrastructure. As part of the Information Systems that support the decision making of this environment, Incident Management Systems are used and usually provide human resource assignment functionalities. However, the assignment poses several challenges, such as establishing priorities to tasks and defining when and how tasks are allocated to available system administrators. This paper describes a set of incident dispatching policies that can be used, and by using workloads from different departments of an IT service provider, this work evaluates the impact of task preemption on incident resolution and service level agreement attainment.