A PTAS for Minimizing Average Weighted Completion Time With Release Dates on Uniformly Related Machines

A classical scheduling problem is to find schedules that minimize average weighted completion time of jobs with release dates. When multiple machines are available, the machine environments may range from identical machines (the processing time required by a job is invariant across the machines) at one end, to unrelated machines (the processing time required by a job on any machine is an arbitrary function of the specific machine) at the other end of the spectrum. While the problem is strongly NP-hard even in the case of a single machine, constant factor approximation algorithms have been known for even the most general machine environment of unrelated machines. Recently, a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) was discovered for the case of identical parallel machines [1]. In contrast, it is known that this problem is MAX SNP-hard for unrelated machines [10]. An important open problem is to determine the approximability of the intermediate case of uniformly related machines where each machine i has a speed si and it takes p/si time to executing a job of processing size pIn this paper, we resolve this problem by obtaining a PTAS for the problem. This improves the earlier known ratio of (2 + ∈) for the problem