A note: minimizing total absolute deviation of job completion times on unrelated machines with general position-dependent processing times and job-rejection

Abstract

We study a scheduling problem with the objective of minimizing total absolute deviation of completion times (TADC). TADC is considered here in the most general form studied so far: the machine setting is that of parallel unrelated, job processing time are assumed to be position-dependent with no restrictions on the functional form, and the option of processing only a subset of the jobs (i.e., job-rejection) is allowed. We show that minimizing TADC in this very general form remains polynomially solvable in the number of jobs.