Single machine scheduling of unit-time jobs with controllable release dates

The paper presents a bicriterion approach to solve the single-machine scheduling problem in which the job release dates can be compressed while incurring additional costs. The two criteria are the makespan and the compression cost. For the case of equal job processing times, an O(n(4)) algorithm is developed to construct integer Pareto optimal points. We discuss how the algorithm developed can be modified to construct an epsilon-approximation of noninteger Pareto optimal points. The complexity status of the problem with total weighted completion time criterion is also established.