This paper addresses the question why standard-compliant IT products often do not interoperate. The findings are based on an institutional analysis, three case studies, and a debate among experts. The paper concludes that some dilemmas cannot be resolved easily. However, many causes can be addressed, in particular those in the area of standard development. Where interoperability is concerned, s...

We consider scheduling problems in a multiprocessor system with incompatible jobs (two incompatible jobs cannot be processed by the same machine). We consider the problem to minimize the maximum job completion time. the makespan. This problem is NP-complete. We present a number of polynomial time approximation algorithms for this problem where the job incompatibilities possess a special structu...