Scheduling two agents with controllable processing times

We consider several two-agent scheduling problems with controllable job processing times, where agents A and B have to share either a single machine or two identical machines in parallel while processing their jobs. The processing times of the jobs of agent A are compressible at additional cost. The objective function for agent B is always the same, namely a regular function f(max). Several different objective functions are considered for agent A, including the total completion time plus compression cost, the maximum tardiness plus compression cost, the maximum lateness plus compression cost and the total compression cost subject to deadline constraints (the imprecise computation model). All problems are to minimize the objective function of agent A subject to a given upper bound on the objective function of agent B. These problems have various applications in computer systems as well as in operations management. We provide NP-hardness proofs for the more general problems and polynomial-time algorithms for several special cases of the problems. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.