Decision Diagrams for Solving a Job Scheduling Problem Under Precedence Constraints

Abstract

We consider a job scheduling problem under precedence constraints, a classical problem for a single processor and multiple jobs to be done. The goal is, given processing time of n fixed jobs and precedence constraints over jobs, to find a permutation of n jobs that minimizes the total flow time, i.e., the sum of total wait time and processing times of all jobs, while satisfying the precedence constraints. The problem is an integer program and is NP-hard in general. We propose a decision diagram π-MDD, for solving the scheduling problem exactly. Our diagram is suitable for solving linear optimization over permutations with precedence constraints. We show the effectiveness of our approach on the experiments on large scale artificial scheduling problems. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Theory of computation→ Data structures design and analysis