Bus transactions in a memory controller are scheduled by storing a set of configuration parameters that define a bus scheduling policy, generating values of a set of dynamic cost functions for each bus transaction, ordering the bus transactions in accordance with the bus scheduling policy to produce ordered bus transactions and generating a memory transaction that is derived from the ordered bus transactions. The memory controller includes one or more control registers for storing the set of configuration parameters, a bus interface operable to capture bus transactions from applications, a set of buffers operable to store the bus transactions and the set of dynamic cost functions and one or more registers operable to store the statistical data and a cost policy. The memory controller selects the order of the bus transactions based on an arbitration and selection policy and generates memory transactions to an external memory.