Scheduling jobs on a single machine with release dates, delivery times and controllable processing times: Worst-case analysis

The paper deals with the problem of scheduling jobs on a single machine, in which each job has a release date, a delivery time and a controllable processing time, having its own associated linearly varying cost. An approximation algorithm for minimizing the overall schedule cost is provided which has the performance guarantee of , where is the worst-case performance bound of a procedure used in the proposed algorithm for solving the pure sequencing problem. The best approximation procedure known has .