© 2001 by British Computer Society
Precedence Constrained Scheduling: A Case in P
1 National Technical University of Athens, Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering, Athens, Greece Email: poli@cslab.ece.ntua.gr 2 University of Crete, Computer Science Department, Heraklion, Crete, Greece
Unit execution time precedence constrained scheduling (UET) is an NP-complete problem with very few special cases known to be solvable in P-time. In this article we present a practically useful case of UET solvable in P-time: we show that if the task graph is given in levels that are locally of in-degree two and of width more than 1.55 times the number of processors (plus 1), then an optimal schedule can be found in P-time. Task graphs which represent algebraic computations fall ordinarily in this category. Our algorithm is based on a limited look-ahead technique which allows us to use it in an on-line fashion. In the appendix we give two short NP-completeness proofs which suggest that both width and degree restrictions are needed to get a polynomially solvable subcase.
Received 25 February, 1999. Revised 14 March, 2001.