Mutual exclusion scheduling with interval graphs or related classes: Complexity and algorithms

This note summarizes the main results presented in the author’s Ph.D. thesis, supervised by Professor Michel Van Caneghem and defended on 14th June 2005 at University of Aix-Marseille II, France. The thesis, written in French, is available at http://www.lif-sud.univ-mrs.fr/ Rapports/25-2005.html. The mutual exclusion scheduling problem has an elegant graph-theoretic formulation: given an undirected graph G and an integer k, find a minimum coloring of G such that each color appears at most k times. When G is an interval graph, this problem has some applications in workforce planning. Then, the object of the thesis is to study the complexity of mutual exclusion scheduling problem for interval graphs and related classes.