A truthful mechanism for interval scheduling

Abstract

Motivated by cloud computing, we study a market-based approach for job scheduling on multiple machines where users have hard deadlines and prefer earlier completion times. In our model, completing a job provides a benefit equal to its present value, i.e., the value discounted to the time when the job finishes. Users submit job requirements to the cloud provider who non-preemptively schedules jobs to maximize the social welfare, i.e., the sum of present values of completed jobs. Using a simple and fast greedy algorithm, we obtain a 1+s/(s-1) approximation to the optimal schedule, where s < 1 is the minimum ratio of a job’s deadline to processing time. Building on our approximation algorithm, we construct a pricing rule to incentivize users to truthfully report all job requirements.