LP rounding and combinatorial algorithms for minimizing active and busy time

Jessica Chang (), Samir Khuller () and Koyel Mukherjee ()
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Jessica Chang: University of Maryland
Samir Khuller: University of Maryland
Koyel Mukherjee: University of Maryland

Journal of Scheduling, 2017, vol. 20, issue 6, No 9, 657-680

Abstract: Abstract We consider fundamental scheduling problems motivated by energy issues. In this framework, we are given a set of jobs, each with a release time, deadline, and required processing length. The jobs need to be scheduled on a machine so that at most g jobs are active at any given time. The duration for which a machine is active (i.e., “on”) is referred to as its active time. The goal is to find a feasible schedule for all jobs, minimizing the total active time. When preemption is allowed at integer time points, we show that a minimal feasible schedule already yields a 3-approximation (and this bound is tight) and we further improve this to a 2-approximation via LP rounding techniques. Our second contribution is for the non-preemptive version of this problem. However, since even asking if a feasible schedule on one machine exists is NP-hard, we allow for an unbounded number of virtual machines, each having capacity of g. This problem is known as the busy time problem in the literature and a 4-approximation is known for this problem. We develop a new combinatorial algorithm that gives a 3-approximation. Furthermore, we consider the preemptive busy time problem, giving a simple and exact greedy algorithm when unbounded parallelism is allowed, i.e., g is unbounded. For arbitrary g, this yields an algorithm that is 2-approximate.

Keywords: Active time; Busy time; Batch scheduling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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DOI: 10.1007/s10951-017-0531-3

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