Scheduling linear deteriorating jobs with an availability constraint on a single machine

Abstract

We consider a single machine scheduling problem in which the processing time of a job is a simple linear increasing function of its starting time and the machine is subject to an availability constraint. We consider the non-resumable case. The objectives are to minimize the makespan and the total completion time. We show that both problems are NP-hard and present pseudo-polynomial time optimal algorithms to solve them. Furthermore, for the makespan problem, we present an optimal approximation algorithm for the on-line case, and a fully polynomial time approximation scheme for the off-line case. For the total completion time problem, we provide a heuristic and evaluate its efficiency by computational experiments.