A New Integer Programming Model for the File Transfer Scheduling Problem

摘要

Scheduling the transfer of files in distributed computer systems is an increasing concern. The purpose of this paper is to propose a new time-index integer programming model for the file transfer scheduling problem with integer file length and port restrictions, which is to design a schedule to transfer series of files with different file length while minimizing overall completion time. By different formulations of variables and constraints, our new model contains fewer constraints and variables. And we also propose an enhanced technique to reduce the number of constraints further by utilizing the elementary lower bound and upper bound. Experimental results show that compared to existing best model, our model with the enhanced technique can solve the same instance with only 14.3% of the time. Moreover, our model can solve larger instances (up to 100 vertices and 600 files) to optimality that can not be solved by existing models.