Non-preemptive Scheduling in a Smart Grid Model and its Implications on Machine Minimization

We study a scheduling problem arising in demand response management in smart grid. Consumers send in power requests with a flexible feasible time interval during which their requests can be served. The grid controller, upon receiving power requests, schedules each request within the specified interval. The electricity cost is measured by a convex function of the load in each timeslot. The objective is to schedule all requests with the minimum total electricity cost. Previous work has studied cases where jobs have unit power requirement and unit duration. We extend the study to arbitrary power requirement and duration, which has been shown to be NP-hard. We give the first online algorithm for the general problem, and prove that the problem is fixed parameter tractable. We also show that the online algorithm is asymptotically optimal when the objective is to minimize the peak load. In addition, we observe that the classical non-preemptive machine minimization problem is a special case of the smart grid problem with min-peak objective, and show that we can solve the non-preemptive machine minimization problem asymptotically optimally

Chemical Potentials of Quarks Extracted from Particle Transverse Momentum Distributions in Heavy Ion Collisions at RHIC Energies

In the framework of a multisource thermal model, the transverse momentum distributions of charged particles produced in nucleus-nucleus (A-A) and deuteron-nucleus (d-A) collisions at relativistic heavy ion collider (RHIC) energies are investigated by a two-component revised Boltzmann distribution. The calculated results are in agreement with the PHENIX experimental data. It is found that the source temperature increases obviously with increase of the particle mass and incident energy, but it does not show an obvious change with the collision centrality. Then, the values of chemical potentials for up, down, and strange quarks can be obtained from the antiparticle to particle yield ratios in a wide transverse momentum range. The relationship between the chemical potentials of quarks and the transverse momentum with different centralities is investigated, too