In this paper, we investigate the/-preemptive scheduling on parallel machines to maximize the minimum machine completion time, i.e., machine covering problem with limited number of preemptions. It is aimed to obtain the worst case ratio of the objective value of the optimal schedule with unlimited preemptions and that of the schedule allowed to be preempted at most i times. For the m identical machines case, we show the worst case ratio is 2m-i-1/m and we present a polynomial time algorithm which can guarantee the ratio for any 0 〈 i 〈2 m - 1. For the /-preemptive scheduling on two uniform machines case, we only need to consider the cases of i = 0 and i = 1. For both cases, we present two linear time algorithms and obtain the worst case ratios with respect to s, i.e., the ratio of the speeds of two machines.
This paper considers a scheduling problem in two-stage hybrid flow shop, where the first stage consists of two machines formed an open shop and the other stage has only one machine. The objective is to minimize the makespan, i.e., the maximum completion time of all jobs. We first show the problem is NP-hard in the strong sense, then we present two heuristics to solve the problem. Computational experiments show that the combined algorithm of the two heuristics performs well on randomly generated problem instances.
