How the structure of precedence constraints may change the complexity class of scheduling problems

This survey aims at demonstrating that the structure of precedence constraints plays a tremendous role on the complexity of scheduling problems. Indeed many problems can be NP-hard when considering general precedence constraints, while they become polynomially solvable for particular precedence constraints. We also show that there still are many very exciting challenges in this research area

On-line machine scheduling

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Order scheduling in dedicated and flexible machine environments

Order scheduling models are relatively new in the field of scheduling. Consider a facility with m parallel machines that can process k different products (job types). Each machine can process a given subset of different product types. There are n orders from n different clients. Each order requests specific quantities of the various different products that can be produced concurrently on their given subsets of machines; it may have a release date, a weight and a due date. Preemptions may be allowed. An order can not be shipped until the processing of all the products for the order has been completed. Thus, the finish time of an order is the time when the last job of the order has been completed. Even though the idea is somewhat new that order scheduling measures the overall completion time of a set of jobs (i.e., an order requesting different product types) instead of the individual completion time of each product type for any given order, many applications require that decision-makers consider orders rather than the individual product types in orders. Research into order scheduling models is motivated by their various real-life applications in manufacturing systems, equipment maintenance, computing systems, and other industrial contexts, where the components of each order can be processed concurrently on the parallel machines. In this research, two cases of order scheduling models are studied, namely, the fully dedicated environment in which each machine can produce one and only one product type, and the fully flexible machine environment in which each machine can produce all product types. With different side constraints and objective functions, the two cases include a lot of problems that are of interest. Special interest is focused on the minimization of the total weighted completion time, the number of late orders, the maximum lateness, and so on. On the one hand, polynomial time algorithms are proposed for some problems. One the other hand, for problems that are NP-hard, complexity proofs are shown and heuristics with their worst-case performance and empirical analyses are also presented

Review on unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with additional resources

This study deals with an unrelated parallel machine scheduling problem with additional resources (UPMR). That is one of the important sub-problems in the scheduling. UPMR consists of scheduling a set of jobs on unrelated machines. In addition to that, a number of one or more additional resources are needed. UPMR is very important and its importance comes from the wealth of applications; they are applicable to engineering and scientific situations and manufacturing systems such as industrial robots, nurses, machine operators, bus drivers, tools, assembly plant machines, fixtures, pallets, electricity, mechanics, dies, automated guided vehicles, fuel, and more. The importance also comes from the concern about the limitation of resources that are dedicated for the production process. Therefore, researchers and decision makers are still working on UPMR problem to get an optimum schedule for all instances which have not been obtained to this day. The optimum schedule is able to increase the profits and decrease the costs whilst satisfying the customers’ needs. This research aims to review and discuss studies related to unrelated parallel machines and additional resources. Overall, the review demonstrates the criticality of resolving the UPMR problem. Metaheuristic techniques exhibit significant effectiveness in generating results and surpassing other algorithms. Nevertheless, continued improvement is essential to satisfy the evolving requirements of UPMR, which are subject to operational changes based on customer demand

Scheduling Single-Machine Problem Oriented by Just-In-Time Principles - A Case Study

Developments in advanced autonomous production resources have increased the interest in the Single-Machine Scheduling Problem (SMSP). Until now, researchers used SMSP with little to no practical application in industry, but with the introduction of multi-purpose machines, able of executing an entire task, such as 3D Printers, replacing extensive production chains, single-machine problems are becoming a central point of interest in real-world scheduling. In this paper we study how simple, easy to implement, Just-in-Time (JIT) based, constructive heuristics, can be used to optimize customer and enterprise oriented performance measures. Customer oriented performance measures are mainly related to the accomplishment of due dates while enterprise-oriented ones typically consider other time-oriented measures.The authors wish to acknowledge the support of the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT), Portugal, through the grant “Projeto Estratégico – UI 252 – 2011–2012” reference PEst-OE/EME/UI0252/2011 and FCOMP-01-0124FEDER-PEst-OE/EEI/UI0760/2014info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Politiques de gestion d’Énergie et de Température dans les Systèmes Informatiques

Nowadays, the energy consumption and the heat dissipation of computing environmentshave emerged as crucial issues. Indeed, large data centers consume as much electricityas a city while modern processors attain high temperatures degrading their performanceand decreasing their reliability. In this thesis, we study various energy and temperatureaware scheduling problems and we focus on their complexity and approximability.A dominant technique for saving energy is by proper scheduling of the jobs through theoperating system combined with appropriate scaling of the processor’s speed. This techniqueis referred to as speed scaling in the literature. The theoretical study of speed scalingwas initiated by Yao, Demers and Shenker (1995) who considered the single-processorproblem of scheduling preemptively a set of jobs, each one specified by an amount ofwork, a release date and a deadline, so as to minimize the total energy consumption.In order to measure the energy consumption of a processor, the authors considered thewell-known rule according to which the processor’s power consumption is P(t) = s(t)α ateach time t, where s(t) is the processor’s speed at t and α > 1 is a machine-dependentconstant (usually α ∈ [2, 3]). Here, we study speed scaling problems on a single processor,on homogeneous parallel processors, on heterogeneous environments and on shopenvironments. In most cases, the objective is the minimization of the energy but we alsoaddress problems in which we are interested in capturing the trade-off between energyand performance.We tackle speed scaling problems through different approaches. For non-preemptiveproblems, we explore the idea of transforming optimal preemptive schedules to nonpreemptiveones. Moreover, we exploit the fact that some problems can be formulatedas convex programs and we propose greedy algorithms that produce optimal solutionssatisfying the KKT conditions which are necessary and sufficient for optimality in convexprogramming. In the context of convex programming and KKT conditions, we also studythe design of primal-dual algorithms. Additionally, we solve speed scaling problems byformulating them as convex cost flow or minimum weighted bipartite matching problems.Finally, we elaborate on approximating energy minimization problems that can be formulatedas integer configuration linear programs. We can obtain an approximate solutionfor such a problem by solving the fractional relaxation of an integer configuration linearprogram for it and applying randomized rounding.In this thesis, we solve some new energy aware scheduling problems and we improvethe best-known algorithms for some other problems. For instance, we improve the bestknownapproximation algorithm for the single-processor non-preemptive energy minimizationproblem which is strongly NP-hard. When α = 3, we decrease the approximationratio from 2048 to 20. Furthermore, we propose a faster optimal combinatorial algorithmviiviiifor the preemptive migratory energy minimization problem on power-homogeneous processors,while the best-known algorithm was based on solving linear programs. Last butnot least, we improve the best-known approximation algorithm for the preemptive nonmigratoryenergy minimization problem on power-homogeneous processors for fractionalvalues of α. Our algorithm can be applied even in the more general case where the processorsare heterogeneous and, for αmax = 2.5 (which is the maximum constant α amongall processors), we get an improvement of the approximation ratio from 5 to 3.08.In order to manage the thermal behavior of a computing device, we adopt the approachof Chrobak, Dürr, Hurand and Robert (2011). The main assumption is that some jobsare more CPU intensive than others and more heat is generated during their execution.So, each job is associated with a heat contribution which is the impact of the job on theprocessor’s temperature. In this setting, we study the complexity and the approximabilityof multiprocessor scheduling problems where either there is a constraint on the processors’temperature and our aim is to optimize some performance metric or the temperature isthe optimization goal itself.La gestion de la consommation d’énergie et de la température est devenue un enjeucrucial dans les systèmes informatiques. En effet, un grand centre de données consommeautant d’électricité qu’une ville et les processeurs modernes atteignent des températuresimportantes dégradant ainsi leurs performances et leur fiabilité. Dans cette thèse, nousétudions différents problèmes d’ordonnancement prenant en compte la consommationd’énergie et la température des processeurs en se focalisant sur leur complexité et leurapproximabilité. Pour cela, nous utilisons le modèle de Yao et al. (1995) (modèle devariation de vitesse) pour la gestion d’énergie et le modèle de Chrobak et al. (2008) pourla gestion de la température

Multicriteria hybrid flow shop scheduling problem: literature review, analysis, and future research

This research focuses on the Hybrid Flow Shop production scheduling problem, which is one of the most difficult problems to solve. The literature points to several studies that focus the Hybrid Flow Shop scheduling problem with monocriteria functions. Despite of the fact that, many real world problems involve several objective functions, they can often compete and conflict, leading researchers to concentrate direct their efforts on the development of methods that take consider this variant into consideration. The goal of the study is to review and analyze the methods in order to solve the Hybrid Flow Shop production scheduling problem with multicriteria functions in the literature. The analyses were performed using several papers that have been published over the years, also the parallel machines types, the approach used to develop solution methods, the type of method develop, the objective function, the performance criterion adopted, and the additional constraints considered. The results of the reviewing and analysis of 46 papers showed opportunities for future researchon this topic, including the following: (i) use uniform and dedicated parallel machines, (ii) use exact and metaheuristics approaches, (iv) develop lower and uppers bounds, relations of dominance and different search strategiesto improve the computational time of the exact methods,  (v) develop  other types of metaheuristic, (vi) work with anticipatory setups, and (vii) add constraints faced by the production systems itself