Fairness in repetitive scheduling

Recent research found that fairness plays a key role in customer satisfaction. Therefore, many manufacturing and services industries have become aware of the need to treat customers fairly. Still, there is a huge lack of models that enable industries to make operational decisions fairly, such as a fair scheduling of the customers’ jobs. Our main aim in this research is to provide a unified framework to enable schedulers to make fair decisions in repetitive scheduling environments. For doing so, we consider a set of repetitive scheduling problems involving a set of $n$ clients. In each out of $q$ consecutive operational periods (e.g. days), each one of the customers submits a job for processing by an operational system. The scheduler’s aim is to provide a schedule for each of the $q$ periods such that the quality of service (QoS) received by each of the clients will meet a certain predefined threshold. The QoS of a client may take several different forms, e.g., the number of days that the customer receives its job later than a given due date, the number of times the customer receives his preferred time slot for service, or the sum of waiting times for service. We analyze the single machine variant of the problem for several different definitions of QoS, and classify the complexity of the corresponding problems using the theories of classical and parameterized complexity. We also study the price of fairness, i.e., the loss in the system’s efficiency that results from the need to provide fair solutions.