Refining the Complexity Landscape of Speed Scaling: Hardness and Algorithms

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Antoniadis, Antonios, Graafsma, Denise, Hoeksma, Ruben, Vlasiou, Maria
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908829683286016
author Antoniadis, Antonios
Graafsma, Denise
Hoeksma, Ruben
Vlasiou, Maria
author_facet Antoniadis, Antonios
Graafsma, Denise
Hoeksma, Ruben
Vlasiou, Maria
contents We study the computational complexity of scheduling jobs on a single speed-scalable processor with the objective of capturing the trade-off between the (weighted) flow time and the energy consumption. This trade-off has been extensively explored in the literature through a number of problem formulations that differ in the specific job characteristics and the precise objective function. Nevertheless, the computational complexity of four important problem variants has remained unresolved and was explicitly identified as an open question in prior work. In this paper, we settle the complexity of these variants. More specifically, we prove that the problem of minimizing the objective of total (weighted) flow time plus energy is NP-hard for the cases of (i) unit-weight jobs with arbitrary sizes, and (ii)~arbitrary-weight jobs with unit sizes. These results extend to the objective of minimizing the total (weighted) flow time subject to an energy budget and hold even when the schedule is required to adhere to a given priority ordering. In contrast, we show that when a completion-time ordering is provided, the same problem variants become polynomial-time solvable. The latter result highlights the subtle differences between priority and completion orderings for the problem.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_17663
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Refining the Complexity Landscape of Speed Scaling: Hardness and Algorithms
Antoniadis, Antonios
Graafsma, Denise
Hoeksma, Ruben
Vlasiou, Maria
Data Structures and Algorithms
Computational Complexity
Discrete Mathematics
We study the computational complexity of scheduling jobs on a single speed-scalable processor with the objective of capturing the trade-off between the (weighted) flow time and the energy consumption. This trade-off has been extensively explored in the literature through a number of problem formulations that differ in the specific job characteristics and the precise objective function. Nevertheless, the computational complexity of four important problem variants has remained unresolved and was explicitly identified as an open question in prior work. In this paper, we settle the complexity of these variants. More specifically, we prove that the problem of minimizing the objective of total (weighted) flow time plus energy is NP-hard for the cases of (i) unit-weight jobs with arbitrary sizes, and (ii)~arbitrary-weight jobs with unit sizes. These results extend to the objective of minimizing the total (weighted) flow time subject to an energy budget and hold even when the schedule is required to adhere to a given priority ordering. In contrast, we show that when a completion-time ordering is provided, the same problem variants become polynomial-time solvable. The latter result highlights the subtle differences between priority and completion orderings for the problem.
title Refining the Complexity Landscape of Speed Scaling: Hardness and Algorithms
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
Computational Complexity
Discrete Mathematics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.17663