Approximation Schemes for Covering and Scheduling on Related Machines

We consider the problem of assigning a set of jobs to m parallel related machines so as to maximize the minimum load over the machines. This situation corresponds to a case that a system which consists of the m machines is alive (i.e. productive) only when all machines are alive, and the system should be maintained alive as long as possible. The above problem is called related machines covering problem and is different from the related machines scheduling problem in which the goal is to minimize the maximum load. Our main result is a polynomial approximation scheme for this covering problem. To the best of our knowledge the previous best approximation algorithm has a performance ratio of 2. Also, an approximation scheme for the special case of identical machines was given by [14].

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