New algorithms for coupled tasks scheduling – a survey

The coupled tasks scheduling problem is a class of scheduling problems introduced for beam steering software of sophisticated radar devices, called phased arrays. Due to increasing popularity of such radars, the importance of coupled tasks scheduling is constantly growing. Unfortunately, most of the coupled tasks problems are NP-hard, and only a few practically usable algorithms for such problems were found. This paper provides a survey of already known complexity results of various variants of coupled tasks problems. Then, it complements previous results by providing experimental results of two new polynomial algorithms for coupled tasks scheduling, which are: an exact algorithm for 1|(1,4,1) ,strictchains | C max problem, and a fast heuristic algorithm for more general 1|(1,2 k, 1) , strictchains | C max problem, where k  ∈ ℕ.