Scheduling with resource-dependent release dates—a comparison of two different resource consumption functions

We consider the problem of scheduling a set of jobs on a single machine where the release time of a job is related to the amount of resource consumed. The objective is to minimize the total resource consumption with a control on the completion times of the jobs. Four different variants of the problem are studied: (i) minimization of the total resource consumption subject to a common deadline for all jobs, (ii) minimization of the total resource consumption subject to a constraint on the total completion time of the jobs, (iii) minimization of the weighted total resource consumption and maximum job completion time, and (iv) minimization of the weighted total resource consumption and the total job completion time. We compare the common resource consumption function with the function where the resource consumed is proportional to the processing time of the job. We show that these two different resource consumption functions can give rise to very different solution methods and different computational complexities for the problem. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.