22,365 research outputs found
How Unsplittable-Flow-Covering helps Scheduling with Job-Dependent Cost Functions
Generalizing many well-known and natural scheduling problems, scheduling with
job-specific cost functions has gained a lot of attention recently. In this
setting, each job incurs a cost depending on its completion time, given by a
private cost function, and one seeks to schedule the jobs to minimize the total
sum of these costs. The framework captures many important scheduling objectives
such as weighted flow time or weighted tardiness. Still, the general case as
well as the mentioned special cases are far from being very well understood
yet, even for only one machine. Aiming for better general understanding of this
problem, in this paper we focus on the case of uniform job release dates on one
machine for which the state of the art is a 4-approximation algorithm. This is
true even for a special case that is equivalent to the covering version of the
well-studied and prominent unsplittable flow on a path problem, which is
interesting in its own right. For that covering problem, we present a
quasi-polynomial time -approximation algorithm that yields an
-approximation for the above scheduling problem. Moreover, for
the latter we devise the best possible resource augmentation result regarding
speed: a polynomial time algorithm which computes a solution with \emph{optimal
}cost at speedup. Finally, we present an elegant QPTAS for the
special case where the cost functions of the jobs fall into at most
many classes. This algorithm allows the jobs even to have up to many
distinct release dates.Comment: 2 pages, 1 figur
Design choices for agent-based control of AGVs in the dough making process
In this paper we consider a multi-agent system (MAS) for the logistics control of Automatic Guided Vehicles (AGVs) that are used in the dough making process at an industrial bakery. Here, logistics control refers to constructing robust schedules for all transportation jobs. The paper discusses how alternative MAS designs can be developed and compared using cost, frequency of messages between agents, and computation time for evaluating control rules as performance indicators. Qualitative design guidelines turn out to be insufficient to select the best agent architecture. Therefore, we also use simulation to support decision making, where we use real-life data from the bakery to evaluate several alternative designs. We find that architectures in which line agents initiate allocation of transportation jobs, and AGV agents schedule multiple jobs in advance, perform best. We conclude by discussing the benefits of our MAS systems design approach for real-life applications
A scheduling theory framework for GPU tasks efficient execution
Concurrent execution of tasks in GPUs can reduce the computation time of a workload by
overlapping data transfer and execution commands.
However it is difficult to implement an efficient run-
time scheduler that minimizes the workload makespan
as many execution orderings should be evaluated. In
this paper, we employ scheduling theory to build a
model that takes into account the device capabili-
ties, workload characteristics, constraints and objec-
tive functions. In our model, GPU tasks schedul-
ing is reformulated as a flow shop scheduling prob-
lem, which allow us to apply and compare well known
methods already developed in the operations research
field. In addition we develop a new heuristic, specif-
ically focused on executing GPU commands, that
achieves better scheduling results than previous tech-
niques. Finally, a comprehensive evaluation, showing
the suitability and robustness of this new approach,
is conducted in three different NVIDIA architectures
(Kepler, Maxwell and Pascal).Proyecto TIN2016- 0920R, Universidad de Málaga (Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech) y programa de donación de NVIDIA Corporation
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