Internet and Network Economics
Volume 3828 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science pp 55-69
Coordination Mechanisms for Selfish Scheduling
- Nicole ImmorlicaAffiliated withMassachusetts Institute of Technology
- , Li LiAffiliated withBell Labs, Center for Networking Research
- , Vahab S. MirrokniAffiliated withMassachusetts Institute of Technology
- , Andreas SchulzAffiliated withOperations Research Center, MIT
Abstract
In machine scheduling, a set of n jobs must be scheduled on a set of m machines. Each job i incurs a processing time of p ij on machine j and the goal is to schedule jobs so as to minimize some global objective function, such as the maximum makespan of the schedule considered in this paper. Often in practice, each job is controlled by an independent selfish agent who chooses to schedule his job on machine which minimizes the (expected) completion time of his job. This scenario can be formalized as a game in which the players are job owners; the strategies are machines; and the disutility to each player in a strategy profile is the completion time of his job in the corresponding schedule (a player’s objective is to minimize his disutility). The equilibria of these games may result in larger-than-optimal overall makespan. The ratio of the worst-case equilibrium makespan to the optimal makespan is called the price of anarchy of the game. In this paper, we design and analyze scheduling policies, or coordination mechanisms, for machines which aim to minimize the price of anarchy (restricted to pure Nash equilibria) of the corresponding game. We study coordination mechanisms for four classes of multiprocessor machine scheduling problems and derive upper and lower bounds for the price of anarchy of these mechanisms. For several of the proposed mechanisms, we also are able to prove that the system converges to a pure Nash equilibrium in a linear number of rounds. Finally, we note that our results are applicable to several practical problems arising in networking.
- Title
- Coordination Mechanisms for Selfish Scheduling
- Book Title
- Internet and Network Economics
- Book Subtitle
- First International Workshop, WINE 2005, Hong Kong, China, December 15-17, 2005. Proceedings
- Pages
- pp 55-69
- Copyright
- 2005
- DOI
- 10.1007/11600930_7
- Print ISBN
- 978-3-540-30900-0
- Online ISBN
- 978-3-540-32293-1
- Series Title
- Lecture Notes in Computer Science
- Series Volume
- 3828
- Series ISSN
- 0302-9743
- Publisher
- Springer Berlin Heidelberg
- Copyright Holder
- Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
- Additional Links
- Topics
- Industry Sectors
- eBook Packages
- Editors
-
- Xiaotie Deng (16)
- Yinyu Ye (17)
- Editor Affiliations
-
- 16. Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong
- 17. Stanford University
- Authors
-
- Nicole Immorlica (18)
- Li Li (19)
- Vahab S. Mirrokni (18)
- Andreas Schulz (20)
- Author Affiliations
-
- 18. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA
- 19. Bell Labs, Center for Networking Research, Murray Hill, NJ, USA
- 20. Operations Research Center, MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA
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