TY - JOUR
T1 - Job scheduling methods for reducing waiting time variance
AU - Ye, Nong
AU - Li, Xueping
AU - Farley, Toni
AU - Xu, Xiaoyun
N1 - Funding Information:
This work is sponsored by the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) under Grant number F49620-01-1-0317. The US government is authorized to reproduce and distribute reprints for governmental purposes notwithstanding any copyright annotation thereon. The views and conclusions contained herein are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies or endorsements, either express or implied, of, DoD, AFOSR, or the US Government. The authors would like to thank Patrick Hurley and John Faust at the Air Force Research Laboratory for their collaboration with us and their inputs to our research work.
PY - 2007/10
Y1 - 2007/10
N2 - Minimizing Waiting Time Variance (WTV) is a job scheduling problem where we schedule a batch of n jobs, for servicing on a single resource, in such a way that the variance of their waiting times is minimized. Minimizing WTV is a well known scheduling problem, important in providing Quality of Service (QoS) in many industries. Minimizing the variance of job waiting times on computer networks can lead to stable and predictable network performance. Since the WTV minimization problem is NP-hard, we develop two heuristic job scheduling methods, called Balanced Spiral and Verified Spiral, which incorporate certain proven properties of optimal job sequences for this problem. We test and compare our methods with four other job scheduling methods on both small and large size problem instances. Performance results show that Verified Spiral gives the best performance for the scheduling methods and problems tested in this study. Balanced Spiral produces comparable results, but at less computational cost. During our investigation we discovered a consistent pattern in the plot of WTV over mean of all possible sequences for a set of jobs, which can be used to evaluate the sacrifice of mean waiting time while pursuing WTV minimization.
AB - Minimizing Waiting Time Variance (WTV) is a job scheduling problem where we schedule a batch of n jobs, for servicing on a single resource, in such a way that the variance of their waiting times is minimized. Minimizing WTV is a well known scheduling problem, important in providing Quality of Service (QoS) in many industries. Minimizing the variance of job waiting times on computer networks can lead to stable and predictable network performance. Since the WTV minimization problem is NP-hard, we develop two heuristic job scheduling methods, called Balanced Spiral and Verified Spiral, which incorporate certain proven properties of optimal job sequences for this problem. We test and compare our methods with four other job scheduling methods on both small and large size problem instances. Performance results show that Verified Spiral gives the best performance for the scheduling methods and problems tested in this study. Balanced Spiral produces comparable results, but at less computational cost. During our investigation we discovered a consistent pattern in the plot of WTV over mean of all possible sequences for a set of jobs, which can be used to evaluate the sacrifice of mean waiting time while pursuing WTV minimization.
KW - Computer networks
KW - Job scheduling
KW - Quality of Service (QoS)
KW - Waiting time variance
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U2 - 10.1016/j.cor.2005.11.015
DO - 10.1016/j.cor.2005.11.015
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:33847627486
SN - 0305-0548
VL - 34
SP - 3069
EP - 3083
JO - Computers and Operations Research
JF - Computers and Operations Research
IS - 10
ER -