Preemptive scheduling with availability constraints to minimize total weighted completion times

In this paper we study the problem of scheduling n jobs on a single machine with availability constraints. The objective is to minimize total weighted job completion times. We show that the problem is NP-hard in the strong sense. Then we consider two intractable special cases, namely, proportional weight case, and single availability constraint case. We propose two heuristics for these cases and analyze their worst-case error bounds.