Multi-Priority Online Scheduling with Cancellations

We study a fundamental model of resource allocation in which a finite amount of service capacity must be allocated to a stream of jobs of different priorities arriving randomly over time. Jobs incur costs and may also cancel while waiting for service. To increase the rate of service, overtime capaci...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inOperations research Vol. 66; no. 1; pp. 104 - 122
Main Authors Wang, Xinshang, Truong, Van-Anh
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Linthicum INFORMS 01.01.2018
Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences
Subjects
Algorithms
Analysis
analysis of algorithms
approximations/heuristic
Cancellations
Computing costs
CONTEXTUAL AREAS
cost analysis
Health care
Mathematical models
Online transaction processing
Operations research
Overtime
Priority scheduling
Resource allocation
Scheduling
Scheduling (Management)
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Summary:We study a fundamental model of resource allocation in which a finite amount of service capacity must be allocated to a stream of jobs of different priorities arriving randomly over time. Jobs incur costs and may also cancel while waiting for service. To increase the rate of service, overtime capacity can be used at a cost. This model has application in healthcare scheduling, server applications, make-to-order manufacturing systems, general service systems, and green computing. We present an online algorithm that minimizes the total cost due to waiting, cancellations and overtime capacity usage. We prove that our scheduling algorithm has cost at most twice of an optimal offline algorithm. This competitive ratio is the best possible for this class of problems. We also provide extensive numerical experiments to test the performance of our algorithm and its variants.
ISSN:0030-364X
1526-5463
DOI:10.1287/opre.2017.1653