An Improved Online Algorithm for the Online Preemptive Scheduling of Equal-Length Intervals on a Single Machine with Lookahead

Abstract

This paper studies the online preemptive scheduling of equal-length intervals on a single machine with lookahead. Let [Formula: see text] be the length (processing time) of all intervals. In the problem, at every time point [Formula: see text], online algorithms can foresee all the intervals that will arrive in the time segment [Formula: see text] for a certain [Formula: see text]. When [Formula: see text], Zheng et al. [Comput- ers & Operations Research, 2013] established a lower bound of [Formula: see text] and provided an online algorithm with a competitive ratio of 3. In this paper, we provide for this problem an improved online algorithm with a competitive ratio of 2.