Preemptive open shop scheduling with multiprocessors: polynomial cases and applications

This paper addresses a multiprocessor generalization of the preemptive open-shop scheduling problem. The set of processors is partitioned into two groups and the operations of the jobs may require either single processors in either group or simultaneously all processors from the same group. We consider two variants depending on whether preemptions are allowed at any fractional time points or only at integer time points. We reduce the former problem to solving a linear program in strongly polynomial time, while a restricted version of the second problem is solved by rounding techniques. Applications to course scheduling and hypergraph edge coloring are also discussed.