Shortest Elapsed Time First Scheduling

Keywords and Synonyms

Sojourn time; Response time; Scheduling with unknown job sizes; MLF algorithm ; Feedback Queues              

Problem Definition

The problem is concerned with scheduling dynamically arriving jobs in the scenario when the processing requirements of jobs are unknown to the scheduler. The lack of knowledge of how long a job will take to execute is a particularly attractive assumption in real systems where such information might be difficult or impossible to obtain. The goal is to schedule jobs to provide good quality of service to the users. In particular the goal is to design algorithms that have good average performance and are also fair in the sense that no subset of users experiences substantially worse performance than others.

Notations

Let ${ \mathcal{J} = \{1,2, \dots,n\} }$ denote the set of jobs in the input instance. Each job j is characterized by its release time r _j and its processing requirement p _j . In the online setting, job jis revealed to the scheduler only...