Single-machine scheduling under the job rejection constraint

In this paper, we consider single-machine scheduling problems under the job rejection constraint. A job is either rejected, in which case a rejection penalty has to be paid, or accepted and processed on the single machine. However, the total rejection penalty of the rejected jobs cannot exceed a given upper bound. The objective is to find a schedule such that a given criterion f is minimized, where f is a non-decreasing function on the completion times of the accepted jobs. We analyze the computational complexities of the problems for distinct objective functions and present pseudo-polynomial-time algorithms. In addition, we provide a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme for the makespan problem with release dates. For other objective functions related to due dates, we point out that there is no approximation algorithm with a bounded approximation ratio. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.