Parallel machine covering with limited number of preemptions

In this paper, we investigate the i-preemptive scheduling on parallel machines to maximize the minimum machine completion time, i.e., machine covering problem with limited number of preemptions. It is aimed to obtain the worst case ratio of the objective value of the optimal schedule with unlimited preemptions and that of the schedule allowed to be preempted at most i times. For the m identical machines case, we show the worst case ratio is {ie18-1}, and we present a polynomial time algorithm which can guarantee the ratio for any 0 ≤ i ≤ m − 1. For the i-preemptive scheduling on two uniform machines case, we only need to consider the cases of i = 0 and i = 1. For both cases, we present two linear time algorithms and obtain the worst case ratios with respect to s, i.e., the ratio of the speeds of two machines.