Preemptive scheduling on two identical parallel machines with a single transporter

摘要

We consider a scheduling problem on two identical parallel machines, in which the jobs are moved between the machines by an uncapacitated transporter. In the processing preemption is allowed. The objective is to minimize the time by which all completed jobs are collected together on board the transporter. We identify the structural patterns of an optimal schedule and design an algorithm that either solves the problem to optimality or in the worst case behaves as a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme.