A survey of scheduling problems with late work criteria

The paper presents the first complete survey of scheduling problems with the late work criteria. Late work objective functions estimate the quality of a schedule based on durations of late parts of jobs, not taking into account the amount of delay for fully late jobs. The paper provides a formal definition of the late work parameter and compares the criteria based on it with other classical performance measures. It shows the relationship between the late work model and the imprecise computation model known from the hard real-time literature. Moreover, the paper presents a few real world applications of the late work objective function. The paper lists results obtained for nearly forty problems of scheduling jobs on a single machine, parallel (identical and uniform) machines and dedicated machines, investigated in the literature since 1984. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.