Minimizing the maximum starting time on-line

Abstract

We study the schedulingproblem of minimizing the maximum startingtime on-line. The goal is to minimize the last time that a job starts. We show that while the greedy algorithm has a competitive ratio of Ө(log m), we can give a constant competitive algorithm for this problem. We also show that the greedy algorithm is optimal for resource augmentation in the sense that it requires 2m — 1 machines to have a competitive ratio of 1, whereas no algorithm can achieve this with 2m — 2 machines.