Increasing speed scheduling and flow scheduling

Abstract

Network flows and scheduling have been studied intensely, but mostly separately. In many applications a joint optimization model for routing and scheduling is desireable. Therefore, we study flows over time with a demand split into jobs. Our objective is to minimize the weighted sum of completion times of these jobs. This is closely related to preemptive scheduling on a single machine with a processing speed increasing over time. For both, flow scheduling and increasing speed scheduling, we provide an EPTAS. Without release dates we can prove a tight approximation factor of (√3+1)/2 for Smith's rule, by fully characterizing the worst case instances. We give exact algorithms for some special cases and a dynamic program for speed functions with a constant number of speeds. We can prove a competitive ratio of 2 for the online version. We also study the class of blind algorithms, i.e., those which schedule without knowledge of the speed function. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.