Online busy time scheduling with flexible jobs

Abstract: We present several competitive ratios for the online busy time scheduling problem with flexible jobs. The busy time scheduling problem is a fundamental scheduling problem motivated by energy efficiency with the goal of minimizing the total time that machines with multiple processors are enabled. In the busy time scheduling problem, an unbounded number of machines is given, where each machine has $g$ processors. No more than $g$ jobs can be scheduled simultaneously on each machine. A machine consumes energy whenever at least one job is scheduled at any time on the machine. Scheduling a single job at some time $t$ consumes the same amount of energy as scheduling $g$ jobs at time $t$. In the online setting, jobs are revealed when they are released. We consider the cases where $g$ is unbounded and bounded. In this paper, we revisit the bounds of the unbounded general setting from the literature and tighten it significantly. We also consider agreeable jobs. For the bounded setting, we show a tightened upper bound. Furthermore, we show the first constant competitive ratio in the bounded setting that does not require lookahead.