Abstract
The “Priority Algorithm” is a model of computation introduced by Borodin, Nielsen and Rackoff ((Incremental) Priority algorithms, Algorithmica 37(4):295–326, 2003) which formulates a wide class of greedy algorithms. For an arbitrary set \(\mathbb{S}\) of jobs, we are interested in whether or not there exists a priority algorithm that gains optimal profit on every subset of \(\mathbb{S}\) . In the case where the jobs are all intervals, we characterize such sets \(\mathbb{S}\) and give an efficient algorithm (when \(\mathbb{S}\) is finite) for determining this. We show that in general, however, the problem is NP-hard.
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This work was partially supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.
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Papakonstantinou, P.A., Rackoff, C.W. Characterizing sets of jobs that admit optimal greedy-like algorithms. J Sched 13, 163–176 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-009-0148-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10951-009-0148-2