648 research outputs found
New Results on Online Resource Minimization
We consider the online resource minimization problem in which jobs with hard
deadlines arrive online over time at their release dates. The task is to
determine a feasible schedule on a minimum number of machines. We rigorously
study this problem and derive various algorithms with small constant
competitive ratios for interesting restricted problem variants. As the most
important special case, we consider scheduling jobs with agreeable deadlines.
We provide the first constant ratio competitive algorithm for the
non-preemptive setting, which is of particular interest with regard to the
known strong lower bound of n for the general problem. For the preemptive
setting, we show that the natural algorithm LLF achieves a constant ratio for
agreeable jobs, while for general jobs it has a lower bound of Omega(n^(1/3)).
We also give an O(log n)-competitive algorithm for the general preemptive
problem, which improves upon the known O(p_max/p_min)-competitive algorithm.
Our algorithm maintains a dynamic partition of the job set into loose and tight
jobs and schedules each (temporal) subset individually on separate sets of
machines. The key is a characterization of how the decrease in the relative
laxity of jobs influences the optimum number of machines. To achieve this we
derive a compact expression of the optimum value, which might be of independent
interest. We complement the general algorithmic result by showing lower bounds
that rule out that other known algorithms may yield a similar performance
guarantee
Approximation Results for Preemptive Stochastic Online Scheduling
We present first constant performance guarantees for preemptive stochastic scheduling to minimize the sum of weighted completion times. For scheduling jobs with release dates on identical parallel machines we derive policies with a guaranteed performance ratio of 2 which matches the currently best known result for the corresponding deterministic online problem. Our policies apply to the recently introduced stochastic online scheduling model inwhich jobs arrive online over time. In contrast to the previously considered nonpreemptivesetting, our preemptive policies extensively utilize information on processing time distributions other than the first (and second) moments. In order to derive our results we introduce a new nontrivial lower bound on the expected value of an unknown optimal policy that we derive from an optimal policy for the basic problem on a single machine without release dates. This problem is known to be solved optimally by a Gittins index priority rule. This priority index also inspires the design of our policies.computer science applications;
Non-Preemptive Scheduling on Machines with Setup Times
Consider the problem in which n jobs that are classified into k types are to
be scheduled on m identical machines without preemption. A machine requires a
proper setup taking s time units before processing jobs of a given type. The
objective is to minimize the makespan of the resulting schedule. We design and
analyze an approximation algorithm that runs in time polynomial in n, m and k
and computes a solution with an approximation factor that can be made
arbitrarily close to 3/2.Comment: A conference version of this paper has been accepted for publication
in the proceedings of the 14th Algorithms and Data Structures Symposium
(WADS
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