Prioritizable

Prioritizable is an adjective used to describe items that can be assigned a priority value or ordered relative to one another. The concept is central to scheduling, queue management, and resource allocation.

In computing and operations research, a set of prioritizable items is equipped with a priority relation, often a total or partial order, enabling a scheduler to select which item to process next. Common implementations include priority queues and heaps. Priorities can be static, assigned before execution, or dynamic, updated in response to time, aging, deadlines, or observed performance.

In real-time systems and multi-tasking environments, prioritizability enables preemptive or non-preemptive scheduling and helps manage CPU time, network traffic, or manufacturing resources. This facilitates decisions about what to run or transmit first, influencing latency, throughput, and responsiveness.

Applications span operating systems, networking (quality of service), database query planning, and project management, where processes, packets, or tasks are reordered to meet latency targets, fairness, or throughput goals. Design choices often involve trade-offs between efficiency and fairness, as well as mechanisms to prevent starvation, such as aging, priority classes, or quotas.

Formally, a prioritizable set supports a priority function that assigns a comparable value to each item; a policy governs how the highest-priority item is chosen and possibly preempted. Related concepts include prioritization, priority queues, and scheduling algorithms that use different notions of fairness and responsiveness.