Online scheduling on a single machine with one restart for all jobs to minimize the weighted makespan

Abstract

In this paper, we consider the online scheduling problem on a single machine to minimize the weighted makespan. In this problem, all jobs arrive over time and they are allowed to be restarted only once. For the general case when the processing times of all jobs are arbitrary, we show that there is no online algorithm with a competitive ratio of less than 2, which matches the lower bound of the problem without restart. That is, only one restart for all jobs is invalid for improving the competitive ratio in the general case. For the special case when all jobs have the same processing time, we present the best possible online algorithm with a competitive ratio of 1.4656, which improves the competitive ratio of $ \frac{1+\sqrt{5}}{2}\approx1.618 $ for the problem without restart.

Keywords

• scheduling
• restart
• the weighted makespan
• online algorithm
• competitive ratio