Integrality Property in Preemptive Parallel Machine Scheduling

We consider parallel machine scheduling problems with identical machines and preemption allowed. It is shown that every such problem with chain precedence constraints and release dates and an integer-concave objective function satisfies the following integrality property : for any problem instance with integral data there exists an optimal schedule where all interruptions occur at integral dates. As a straightforward consequence of this result, for a wide class of scheduling problems with unit processing times a so-called preemption redundancy property is valid. This means that every such preemptive scheduling problem is equivalent to its non-preemptive counterpart from the viewpoint of both its optimum value and the problem complexity. The equivalence provides new and simpler proofs for some known complexity results and closes a few open questions.

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