How Unsplittable-Flow-Covering Helps Scheduling with Job-Dependent Cost Functions

The General Scheduling Problem (GSP) generalizes scheduling problems with sum of cost objectives such as weighted flow time and weighted tardiness. Given a set of jobs with processing times, release dates, and job dependent cost functions, we seek to find a minimum cost preemptive schedule on a single machine. The best known algorithm for this problem and also for weighted flow time/tardiness is an O(loglog P)-approximation (where P denotes the range of the job processing times), while the best lower bound shows only strong NP-hardness. When release dates are identical there is also a gap: the problem remains strongly NP-hard and the best known approximation algorithm has a ratio of e+\epsilon (running in quasi-polynomial time). We reduce the latter gap by giving a QPTAS if the numbers in the input are quasi-polynomially bounded, ruling out the existence of an APX-hardness proof unless NP\subseteq DTIME(2^polylog(n)). Our techniques are based on the QPTAS known for the UFP-Cover problem, a particular case of GSP where we must pick a subset of intervals (jobs) on the real line with associated heights and costs. If an interval is selected, its height will help cover a given demand on any point contained within the interval. We reduce our problem to a generalization of UFP-Cover and use a sophisticated divide-and-conquer procedure with interdependent non-symmetric subproblems. We also present a pseudo-polynomial time approximation scheme for two variants of UFP-Cover. For the case of agreeable intervals we give an algorithm based on a new dynamic programming approach which might be useful for other problems of this type. The second one is a resource augmentation setting where we are allowed to slightly enlarge each interval.

Weighted flow time is a fundamental and very well-studied objective function in scheduling. In this paper, we study the setting of a single machine with preemptions. The input consists of a set of jobs, characterized by their processing times, release times, and weights and we want to compute a (possibly preemptive) schedule for them. The objective is to minimize the sum of the weighted flow times of the jobs, where the flow time of a job is the time between its release date and its completion time. It had been a long-standing open problem to find a polynomial time O(1)-approximation algorithm for this setting. In a recent break-through result, Batra, Garg, and Kumar (FOCS 2018) found such an algorithm if the input data are polynomially bounded integers, and Feige, Kulkarni, and Li (SODA 2019) presented a black-box reduction to this setting. The resulting approximation ratio is a (not explicitly stated) constant which is at least 10000. In this paper we improve this ratio to 2+e. The algorithm by Batra, Garg, and Kumar (FOCS 2018) reduces the problem to Demand MultiCut on trees and solves the resulting instances via LP-rounding and a dynamic program. Instead, we first reduce the problem to a (different) geometric problem while losing only a factor 1+e, and then solve its resulting instances up to a factor of 2+e by a dynamic program. In particular, our reduction ensures certain structural properties, thanks to which we do not need LP-rounding methods. We believe that our result makes substantial progress towards finding a PTAS for weighted flow time on a single machine.

We consider a single-machine scheduling problem. Given some continuous, nondecreasing cost function, we aim to compute a schedule minimizing the weighted total cost, where the cost of each job is determined by the cost function value at its completion time. This problem is closely related to scheduling a single machine with nonuniform processing speed. We show that for piecewise linear cost functions it is strongly NP-hard. The main contribution of this article is a tight analysis of the approximation guarantee of Smith’s rule under any convex or concave cost function. More specifically, for these wide classes of cost functions we reduce the task of determining a worst-case problem instance to a continuous optimization problem, which can be solved by standard algebraic or numerical methods. For polynomial cost functions with positive coefficients, it turns out that the tight approximation ratio can be calculated as the root of a univariate polynomial. We show that this approximation ratio is asymptotically equal to k ( k − 1)/( k + 1) , denoting by k the degree of the cost function. To overcome unrealistic worst-case instances, we also give tight bounds for the case of integral processing times that are parameterized by the maximum and total processing time.

In this thesis, we study the theoretical approach on energy-efficient scheduling problems arising in demand response management in the modern electrical smart grid. Consumers send in power requests with flexible feasible timeslots 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. We study the smart grid scheduling problem in different models. For the offline model, we prove the problem is NP-hard for the general case. We propose a polynomial time algorithm for special input where jobs have unit power request and unit time duration. By adapting the polynomial time algorithm for unit-size jobs, we propose an approximation algorithm for more general input. On the other hand, we also present an exact algorithm to find the optimal schedule for the problem with general input. For the online model, we propose an online algorithm for jobs with jobs with arbitrary power request, arbitrary time duration, and arbitrary contiguous feasible intervals. We also show a lower bound of the competitive ratio for the smart grid scheduling problem with unit height and arbitrary width. For special cases, we design different online algorithms with better competitive ratios. Finally, we look at other optimization problems and show how to solve them by adapting our techniques. We prove that our online algorithm can solve the machine minimization problem with an asymptotically optimal competitive ratio. We also show that our exact algorithm can be adapted to solve other demand response management problems.

We consider the classic scheduling problem of minimizing the total weighted flow-time on a single machine (min-WPFT), when preemption is allowed. In this problem, we are given a set of $n$ jobs, each job having a release time $r_j$, a processing time $p_j$, and a weight $w_j$. The flow-time of a job is defined as the amount of time the job spends in the system before it completes; that is, $F_j = C_j - r_j$, where $C_j$ is the completion time of job. The objective is to minimize the total weighted flow-time of jobs. This NP-hard problem has been studied quite extensively for decades. In a recent breakthrough, Batra, Garg, and Kumar presented a {\em pseudo-polynomial} time algorithm that has an $O(1)$ approximation ratio. The design of a truly polynomial time algorithm, however, remained an open problem. In this paper, we show a transformation from pseudo-polynomial time algorithms to polynomial time algorithms in the context of min-WPFT. Our result combined with the result of Batra, Garg, and Kumar settles the long standing conjecture that there is a polynomial time algorithm with $O(1)$-approximation for min-WPFT.

We consider scheduling problems in which a job consists of components of different types to be processed on m machines. Each machine is capable of processing components of a single type. Different components of a job are independent and can be processed in parallel on different machines. A job is considered as completed only when all its components have been completed. We study both completion time and flowtime aspects of such problems. We show both lowerbounds and upperbounds for the completion time problem. We first show that even the unweighted completion time with single release date is MAX-SNP hard. We give an approximation algorithm based on linear programming which has an approximation ratio of 3 for weighted completion time with multiple release dates. We give online algorithms for the weighted completion time which are constant factor competitive. For the flowtime, we give only lowerbounds in both the offline and online settings. We show that it is NP-hard to approximate flowtime within Ω(log m) in the offline setting. We show that no online algorithm for the flowtime can have a competitive ratio better than Ω(√m).

Optimal schedule for works running on machines, in a general case, is a hard problem and there is no complete optimal deterministic algorithm in polynomial time. Optimal and approximated solutions were issued for some specific cases with constraints. One can find the solutions for the cases 1 and 2 machines [4,16] as the initial algorithms. In [16], author solved late works problem using algorithm with setup times included. [4] solve the due works problem on two machines, and can be extended for the case of 3 machines with some conditions on works. Other authors looked at schedule problems in specific cases like [5,8,17]. In this paper, we apply duration automata [1,2] to solve the schedule problem dynamically for the works with uncertain processing time in a cluster computer, which is a system consisting of many computers (computing nodes) co-working together. We solve the schedule problem in a cluster with $m$ machines for two cases: all machines are the same and different in configurations (machine's resources are formally considered as a configuration information, represented by the time need to finish the works). Because of uncertainly processing time, tranditional algorithms can not be used effectively. By using DA model with DA's order criterion, we issue schedule algorithms and practically prove to be better in time consuming compare to FIFO (natural order), the fastest first (greedy) and the longest first (safety) methods without synchronized points.

We study the distributed nonconvex resource allocation with Limited Communication Data Rate (LCDR) over a communication network. Each node in the network has its own private cost function and determines the optimal resource allocation through interactions solely with its neighboring nodes. The nodes need to cooperatively minimize the total cost function to achieve the optimal resource allocation under the constraint of constant total resources. First, we consider exact communication. By Lagrange dual method, we propose a successive convex approximation-based distributed dual gradient tracking algorithm to solve the distributed nonconvex resource allocation problems. Then, we consider the case of digital communication among nodes based on LCDR. The information transmission among nodes is based on the Dynamic Encoding and Decoding (DED) with finite-level uniform quantization. We propose a successive convex approximation-based distributed dual gradient tracking algorithm with LCDR and conduct numerical simulations. The numerical results show that the algorithm converges based on merely one-bit quantizers when appropriate step sizes and scaling functions are chosen.

In this paper, the distributed resource allocation problem over undirected networks, considering box constraints and demand–supply constraints, is studied. Furthermore, each agent has one private cost function that is only known by itself. The aim is to minimize the sum of all local cost functions in a distributed manner while meeting the constraints. To solve the dispatch problem, a continuous‐time distributed algorithm with fixed step‐size is proposed. After that, a modified distributed algorithm of discrete‐time multi‐agent system is provided. Moreover, the proposed algorithms obtain the global optimal solution with an exponential convergence speed by the conventional Lyapunov methods. Finally, several simulations of IEEE‐14 bus are presented to validate and illustrate the proposed designed algorithm.

2-Approximation algorithms for the multi-vehicle scheduling problem on a path with release and handling times

We consider a class of k-server optimal task scheduling problems partitioning and scheduling N tasks with various real-time constrains and work loads on k servers with convex task processing cost function so as to minimize the total task processing cost while still guaranteeing satisfaction of all time constraints. This class has broad expressing power for practical scheduling problems in several areas such as real-time multimedia wireless transmission , CPU energy conservation, and warehouse order processing management, et. al. Our formulation is quite general such that most previous works can be readily reduced to a special case of the presented k-server optimal task scheduling problem. We show that, when k = 1, optimal solution can be obtained in computational complexity of O(N) and the corresponding optimal scheduling problem is equivalent to finding the shortest 2D Euclidean distance between two vertices inside a well-defined 2D polygon. However, when k 2, the optimal scheduling problem can be demonstrated to be NP-hard by reducing it to a well-known NP-complete bin-packing problem. Therefore, we conclude no polynomial time algorithm exists for a general k-server optimal task scheduling problem. We then construct approximation algorithms to solve the presented k-server problem in a practical way and illustrate its performance by simulation results and analysis.

In a scheduling problemwith controllable processing times the job processing time can be compressed through incurring an additional cost. We consider the problemof scheduling n jobs on a single machine with controllable processing times. Each job has a release date, when it becomes available for processing, and, after completing its processing, requires an additional delivery time. Feasible schedules are further restricted by job precedence constraints. We develop a polynomial time approximation scheme whose running time depends only linearly on the input size. This improves and generalize the previous (3/2 + ?)- approximation algorithm by Zdrzalka.

On the communication complexity of polling

This paper studies the bicriteria problem of scheduling n jobs on a parallel-batching machine to minimize maximum cost and makespan simultaneously. A parallel-batching machine is a machine that can handle up to b jobs in a batch. The jobs in a batch start and complete respectively at the same time and the processing time of a batch is equal to the largest processing time of jobs in the batch. We consider the unbounded case. For the above bicriteria scheduling problem, we present an O(n3)-time algorithm, which improved the best known O(n4)-time algorithm, and the time complexity is the same as the special case in which maximum cost is maximum lateness. Meanwhile, our algorithm can also solve the single-criterion unbounded parallel-batching scheduling problem to minimize maximum cost in O(n3) time, which improved the best known O(n4)-time algorithm.

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