Approximation Techniques for Average Completion Time Scheduling

Abstract

We consider the problem of non-preemptive scheduling to minimize average (weighted) completion time, allowing for release dates, parallel machines, and precedence constraints. Recent work has led to constant-factor approximations for this problem, based on solving a preemptive or linear programming relaxation and then using the solution to get an ordering on the jobs. We introduce several new techniques which generalize this basic paradigm. We use these ideas to obtain improved approximation algorithms for one-machine scheduling to minimize average completion time with release dates. In the process, we obtain an optimal randomized on-line algorithm for the same problem that beats a lower bound for deterministic on-line algorithms. We consider extensions to the case of parallel machine scheduling, and for this we introduce two new ideas: first, we show that a preemptive one-machine relaxation is a powerful tool for designing parallel machine scheduling algorithms that simultan...