We consider several uniform parallel-machine scheduling problems in which the processing time of a job is a linear increasing function of its starting time.The objectives are to minimize the total completion time of all jobs and the total load on all machines.We show that the problems are polynomially solvable when the increasing rates are identical for all jobs;we propose a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for the standard linear deteriorating function,where the objective function is to minimize the total load on all machines.We also consider the problem in which the processing time of a job is a simple linear increasing function of its starting time and each job has a delivery time.The objective is to find a schedule which minimizes the time by which all jobs are delivered,and we propose a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme to solve this problem.
We consider bounded parallel-batch scheduling with proportional-linear deteriorating jobs and the objective to minimize the total completion time.We give some properties of optimal schedules for the problem and present for it a dynamic programming algorithm running in O(b^(2)m^(2)2^(m))time,where b is the size of a batch and m is the number of distinct deterioration rates.
We study strong stability of Nash equilibria in load balancing games of m(m 2)identical servers,in which every job chooses one of the m servers and each job wishes to minimize its cost,given by the workload of the server it chooses.A Nash equilibrium(NE)is a strategy profile that is resilient to unilateral deviations.Finding an NE in such a game is simple.However,an NE assignment is not stable against coordinated deviations of several jobs,while a strong Nash equilibrium(SNE)is.We study how well an NE approximates an SNE.Given any job assignment in a load balancing game,the improvement ratio(IR)of a deviation of a job is defined as the ratio between the pre-and post-deviation costs.An NE is said to be aρ-approximate SNE(ρ1)if there is no coalition of jobs such that each job of the coalition will have an IR more thanρfrom coordinated deviations of the coalition.While it is already known that NEs are the same as SNEs in the 2-server load balancing game,we prove that,in the m-server load balancing game for any given m 3,any NE is a(5/4)-approximate SNE,which together with the lower bound already established in the literature yields a tight approximation bound.This closes the final gap in the literature on the study of approximation of general NEs to SNEs in load balancing games.To establish our upper bound,we make a novel use of a graph-theoretic tool.
