Resource constrained scheduling on multiple machines

Abstract. This paper is devoted to Resource Constrained Scheduling. An instance for this problem is given by a set of n jobs with lengths and weights and a set of m machines with capacities. At every time each machine can run arbitrary many jobs in parallel but the total weight of these jobs must not exceed the capacity of the machine. Furthermore the m machines work in parallel and we wish to find a schedule that minimizes the makespan or the sum of completion times. Thus load balancing on a cluster of servers is a typical application for scheduling under resource constraints. For both measures the problem is NP-complete even for m = 1. We show that the problem is approximable within factors of 2 (makespan) and 14.85 (sum of completion times) for arbitrary m.