Preemptive scheduling of parallel jobs of two sizes with controllable processing times

In parallel machine scheduling, a size of a job is defined as the number of machines that are simultaneously required for its processing. This paper considers a scheduling problem in which the set of jobs consists of jobs of two sizes: the conventional jobs (each job requires a single machine for its processing) and parallel jobs (each job to be simultaneously processed on more than one machine). The processing times are controllable, and they have to be chosen from given intervals in order to guarantee the existence of a preemptive schedule in which all jobs are completed by a common deadline. The objective is to minimize the total compression cost which reflects possible reductions in processing times. Unlike problems of classical scheduling with conventional jobs, the model under consideration cannot be directly handled by submodular optimization methods. We reduce the problem to maximizing the total weighted work of all jobs parametrized with respect to total work of the parallel jobs. The solution is delivered by separately finding the breakpoints for the maximum total weighted work of the parallel jobs and for the maximum total weighted work of the conventional jobs. This results in a polynomial-time algorithm that is no slower than needed to perform sorting of jobs’ parameters.