Competitive kill-and-restart and preemptive strategies for non-clairvoyant scheduling

We study kill-and-restart and preemptive strategies for the fundamental scheduling problem of minimizing the sum of weighted completion times on a single machine in the non-clairvoyant setting. First, we show a lower bound of 3 for any deterministic non-clairvoyant kill-and-restart strategy. Then, we give for any $$b > 1$$ b > 1 a tight analysis for the natural b -scaling kill-and-restart strategy as well as for a randomized variant of it. In particular, we show a competitive ratio of (1+3√3)≈ 6.197 ( 1 + 3 3 ) ≈ 6.197 for the deterministic and of ≈ 3.032 ≈ 3.032 for the randomized strategy, by making use of the largest eigenvalue of a Toeplitz matrix. In addition, we show that the preemptive Weighted Shortest Elapsed Time First (WSETF) rule is 2-competitive when jobs are released online, matching the lower bound for the unit weight case with trivial release dates for any non-clairvoyant algorithm. Using this result as well as the competitiveness of round-robin for multiple machines, we prove performance guarantees smaller than 10 for adaptions of the b -scaling strategy to online release dates and unweighted jobs on identical parallel machines.