Scheduling partially ordered jobs faster than 2^n

Marek Cygan
Marcin Pilipczuk
Michał Pilipczuk
ESA (2011) (to appear)
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Abstract

In the SCHED problem we are given a set of n jobs, together with their processing times and precedence constraints. The task is to order the jobs so that their total completion time is minimized. SCHED is a special case of the Traveling Repairman Problem with precedences. A natural dynamic programming algorithm solves both these problems in 2^n n^O(1) time, and whether there exists an algorithms solving
SCHED in O(c^n) time for some constant c < 2 was an open problem posted in 2004 by Woeginger. In this paper we answer this question positively.