| TR#: | MSC-2001-02 |
| Class: | MSC |
| Title: | Scheduling with Batching and Incompatible Job Families |
| Authors: | Yoav Katz |
| Supervisors: | Hadas Shachnai |
| MSC-2001-02.pdf | |
| Abstract: | We consider the problem of batch scheduling of jobs from
incompatible families, which arises in production systems, in
multimedia-on-demand services, and in many real-life scenarios.
Suppose that $n$ jobs need to be scheduled on $m$ batching
machines, that is, machines that can run several jobs
simultaneously. Each job is given by its family, release date, due
date, and non-negative weight; jobs from the same family have the
same processing time. The machines can process the jobs in batches
of size at most $b$, with the restriction that jobs from different
families cannot be batched together. Our objective is to find a
schedule of the jobs, which maximizes the overall weight of
on-time jobs (i.e., jobs that are scheduled before their due
dates). We call this problem the {\em f-batch} problem. Our
problem is a generalization of classical real-time scheduling;
thus, it is strongly NP-hard.
We first give a detailed characterization of optimal schedules, which enables to develop efficient polynomial time algorithms for our problem. Specifically, we formulate a set of structural properties satisfied by optimal schedules. We then use these properties to obtain optimal solutions for several important classes of instances. A main contribution of this work is a technique for transforming the f-batch problem to a variant of classical real-time scheduling. This transformation is used for deriving the first combinatorial approximation algorithm for the f-batch problem. Our transformation yields a simple $(2+ \epsilon)$-approximation algorithm for general instances with unbounded batch size, based on the Local Ratio technique of Bar-Yehuda and Even ({\em Annals of Discrete Mathematics}, vol. 25, 1985, pp. 27-46). The algorithm can be applied with the same performance ratio to a system of $m$ identical machines, for any $m>1$. |
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