Two agent scheduling with a central selection mechanism

Abstract

Please cite this article in press as: G. Nicosia et al., Two agent scheduling with a central selection mechanism, Theoret. Comput. Sci. (2015), http://dx. AbstractWe address a class of deterministic scheduling problems in which two agents compete for the usage of a single machine. The agents have their own objective functions and submit in each round an arbitrary, unprocessed task from their buffer for possible selection. In each round the shorter of the two submitted tasks is chosen and processed on the machine.We consider the problems under two distinct perspectives: First, we look at them from a centralized point of view as bicriteria optimization problems and try to characterize the set of Pareto optimal solutions. Then, the problems are viewed under the perspective of a single agent. In particular, we measure the worst-case performance of classical priority rules compared to an optimal strategy. Finally, we consider minimax strategies, i.e. algorithms optimizing the objective of one agent in the worst case.

Competitive multi-agent scheduling with an iterative selection rule

“…Hence, in this case, the agents are free to choose any available task for submission at each round, independently from the outcome of the previous round. This is also the setting considered in the current paper which extends and generalizes the results in Nicosia et al (2015) from the special case of 2 agents to the scenario of k agents.…”

“…Note that the decision of an agent on which task to submit in any round may take the submissions and outcomes of previous rounds into account but is not restricted by these past events. This corresponds to the flexible processing setting described in Agnetis et al (2003) and treated extensively in Nicosia et al (2015) for the special case of k = 2 agents.…”

“…In this work we address a multi-agent generalization of a two-agent scheduling problem introduced in Agnetis et al (2003) and later thoroughly analyzed in Nicosia et al (2015). Here, we consider k agents, each owning a set of nonpreemptive tasks (or jobs), that require a single, jointly used, machine to process their tasks.…”

“…This twofold approach has been also adopted in Agnetis et al (2003Agnetis et al ( , 2015, Marini et al (2013) and Nicosia et al (2011Nicosia et al ( , 2015. In particular, in Agnetis et al (2003) the authors introduce a class of two-agent scheduling problems in which the decision process is organized in rounds and provide some preliminary results for different shop configurations.…”

“…In other words, each task is submitted for possible processing, in the given order, until it is scheduled. In Nicosia et al (2015) consider a more general configuration in which there are no queues at the machine and at each round any part from the two agents' buffers can be picked up and submitted for possible processing. Hence, in this case, the agents are free to choose any available task for submission at each round, independently from the outcome of the previous round.…”