75,586 research outputs found
Optimal Algorithms for Scheduling under Time-of-Use Tariffs
We consider a natural generalization of classical scheduling problems in
which using a time unit for processing a job causes some time-dependent cost
which must be paid in addition to the standard scheduling cost. We study the
scheduling objectives of minimizing the makespan and the sum of (weighted)
completion times. It is not difficult to derive a polynomial-time algorithm for
preemptive scheduling to minimize the makespan on unrelated machines. The
problem of minimizing the total (weighted) completion time is considerably
harder, even on a single machine. We present a polynomial-time algorithm that
computes for any given sequence of jobs an optimal schedule, i.e., the optimal
set of time-slots to be used for scheduling jobs according to the given
sequence. This result is based on dynamic programming using a subtle analysis
of the structure of optimal solutions and a potential function argument. With
this algorithm, we solve the unweighted problem optimally in polynomial time.
For the more general problem, in which jobs may have individual weights, we
develop a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) based on a dual
scheduling approach introduced for scheduling on a machine of varying speed. As
the weighted problem is strongly NP-hard, our PTAS is the best possible
approximation we can hope for.Comment: 17 pages; A preliminary version of this paper with a subset of
results appeared in the Proceedings of MFCS 201
Malleable Scheduling Beyond Identical Machines
In malleable job scheduling, jobs can be executed simultaneously on multiple machines with the processing time depending on the number of allocated machines. Jobs are required to be executed non-preemptively and in unison, in the sense that they occupy, during their execution, the same time interval over all the machines of the allocated set. In this work, we study generalizations of malleable job scheduling inspired by standard scheduling on unrelated machines. Specifically, we introduce a general model of malleable job scheduling, where each machine has a (possibly different) speed for each job, and the processing time of a job j on a set of allocated machines S depends on the total speed of S for j. For machines with unrelated speeds, we show that the optimal makespan cannot be approximated within a factor less than e/(e-1), unless P = NP. On the positive side, we present polynomial-time algorithms with approximation ratios 2e/(e-1) for machines with unrelated speeds, 3 for machines with uniform speeds, and 7/3 for restricted assignments on identical machines. Our algorithms are based on deterministic LP rounding and result in sparse schedules, in the sense that each machine shares at most one job with other machines. We also prove lower bounds on the integrality gap of 1+phi for unrelated speeds (phi is the golden ratio) and 2 for uniform speeds and restricted assignments. To indicate the generality of our approach, we show that it also yields constant factor approximation algorithms (i) for minimizing the sum of weighted completion times; and (ii) a variant where we determine the effective speed of a set of allocated machines based on the L_p norm of their speeds
Modeling and Real-Time Scheduling of DC Platform Supply Vessel for Fuel Efficient Operation
DC marine architecture integrated with variable speed diesel generators (DGs)
has garnered the attention of the researchers primarily because of its ability
to deliver fuel efficient operation. This paper aims in modeling and to
autonomously perform real-time load scheduling of dc platform supply vessel
(PSV) with an objective to minimize specific fuel oil consumption (SFOC) for
better fuel efficiency. Focus has been on the modeling of various components
and control routines, which are envisaged to be an integral part of dc PSVs.
Integration with photovoltaic-based energy storage system (ESS) has been
considered as an option to cater for the short time load transients. In this
context, this paper proposes a real-time transient simulation scheme, which
comprises of optimized generation scheduling of generators and ESS using dc
optimal power flow algorithm. This framework considers real dynamics of dc PSV
during various marine operations with possible contingency scenarios, such as
outage of generation systems, abrupt load changes, and unavailability of ESS.
The proposed modeling and control routines with real-time transient simulation
scheme have been validated utilizing the real-time marine simulation platform.
The results indicate that the coordinated treatment of renewable based ESS with
DGs operating with optimized speed yields better fuel savings. This has been
observed in improved SFOC operating trajectory for critical marine missions.
Furthermore, SFOC minimization at multiple suboptimal points with its treatment
in the real-time marine system is also highlighted
Petuum: A New Platform for Distributed Machine Learning on Big Data
What is a systematic way to efficiently apply a wide spectrum of advanced ML
programs to industrial scale problems, using Big Models (up to 100s of billions
of parameters) on Big Data (up to terabytes or petabytes)? Modern
parallelization strategies employ fine-grained operations and scheduling beyond
the classic bulk-synchronous processing paradigm popularized by MapReduce, or
even specialized graph-based execution that relies on graph representations of
ML programs. The variety of approaches tends to pull systems and algorithms
design in different directions, and it remains difficult to find a universal
platform applicable to a wide range of ML programs at scale. We propose a
general-purpose framework that systematically addresses data- and
model-parallel challenges in large-scale ML, by observing that many ML programs
are fundamentally optimization-centric and admit error-tolerant,
iterative-convergent algorithmic solutions. This presents unique opportunities
for an integrative system design, such as bounded-error network synchronization
and dynamic scheduling based on ML program structure. We demonstrate the
efficacy of these system designs versus well-known implementations of modern ML
algorithms, allowing ML programs to run in much less time and at considerably
larger model sizes, even on modestly-sized compute clusters.Comment: 15 pages, 10 figures, final version in KDD 2015 under the same titl
Human-Machine Collaborative Optimization via Apprenticeship Scheduling
Coordinating agents to complete a set of tasks with intercoupled temporal and
resource constraints is computationally challenging, yet human domain experts
can solve these difficult scheduling problems using paradigms learned through
years of apprenticeship. A process for manually codifying this domain knowledge
within a computational framework is necessary to scale beyond the
``single-expert, single-trainee" apprenticeship model. However, human domain
experts often have difficulty describing their decision-making processes,
causing the codification of this knowledge to become laborious. We propose a
new approach for capturing domain-expert heuristics through a pairwise ranking
formulation. Our approach is model-free and does not require enumerating or
iterating through a large state space. We empirically demonstrate that this
approach accurately learns multifaceted heuristics on a synthetic data set
incorporating job-shop scheduling and vehicle routing problems, as well as on
two real-world data sets consisting of demonstrations of experts solving a
weapon-to-target assignment problem and a hospital resource allocation problem.
We also demonstrate that policies learned from human scheduling demonstration
via apprenticeship learning can substantially improve the efficiency of a
branch-and-bound search for an optimal schedule. We employ this human-machine
collaborative optimization technique on a variant of the weapon-to-target
assignment problem. We demonstrate that this technique generates solutions
substantially superior to those produced by human domain experts at a rate up
to 9.5 times faster than an optimization approach and can be applied to
optimally solve problems twice as complex as those solved by a human
demonstrator.Comment: Portions of this paper were published in the Proceedings of the
International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) in 2016 and
in the Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in 2016. The paper
consists of 50 pages with 11 figures and 4 table
Energy-efficient algorithms for non-preemptive speed-scaling
We improve complexity bounds for energy-efficient speed scheduling problems
for both the single processor and multi-processor cases. Energy conservation
has become a major concern, so revisiting traditional scheduling problems to
take into account the energy consumption has been part of the agenda of the
scheduling community for the past few years.
We consider the energy minimizing speed scaling problem introduced by Yao et
al. where we wish to schedule a set of jobs, each with a release date, deadline
and work volume, on a set of identical processors. The processors may change
speed as a function of time and the energy they consume is the th power
of its speed. The objective is then to find a feasible schedule which minimizes
the total energy used.
We show that in the setting with an arbitrary number of processors where all
work volumes are equal, there is a approximation algorithm, where
is the generalized Bell number. This is the first constant
factor algorithm for this problem. This algorithm extends to general unequal
processor-dependent work volumes, up to losing a factor of
in the approximation, where is the maximum
ratio between two work volumes. We then show this latter problem is APX-hard,
even in the special case when all release dates and deadlines are equal and
is 4.
In the single processor case, we introduce a new linear programming
formulation of speed scaling and prove that its integrality gap is at most
. As a corollary, we obtain a
approximation algorithm where there is a single processor, improving on the
previous best bound of
when
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