Scheduling problems in master-slave model

Joseph Y.-T. Leung, Hairong Zhao
2007 Annals of Operations Research  
We consider scheduling problems in the master slave model, which was introduced by Sahni in 1996. The goal is to minimize the makespan and the total completion time. It has been shown that the problem of minimizing makespan is NP-hard. Sahni and Vairaktarakis developed some approximation algorithms to generate schedules whose makespan is at most constant times the optimal. In this paper, we show that the problem of minimizing total completion time is NP-hard in the strong sense. Then we develop
more » ... algorithms to generate schedules whose total completion time and makespan are both bounded by some constants times their optimal values. Keywords Total completion time · Makespan · Approximation algorithms · NP-hard · Master slave model 1 Master-slave model and its applications Master-slave model The master-slave model was introduced by Sahni in 1996. In this model, each job has to be processed sequentially in three stages. In the first stage, the preprocessing task runs on a master machine; in the second stage, the slave task runs on a dedicated slave machine; and in the last stage, the postprocessing task again runs on a master machine, possibly different from the master machine in the first stage. The preprocessing, slave and postprocessing tasks
doi:10.1007/s10479-007-0271-4 fatcat:smtj466k6bhkbhdy5dahhd2vwe