Scheduling

Motivation

Scheduling is a form of decision making that involves allocating scarce resources to achieve some objective. The study of scheduling dates back to at least the 1950's when operations research researchers studied problems of managing activities in a workshop. Computer systems researchers started studying scheduling in the 1960's in the development of operating systems and time-critical applications. Today, scheduling is widely studied as parts of the disciplines of mathematical programming and operations research; algorithmics and theoretical computer science; and computer systems, particularly real-time and embedded systems. The specific scarce resources, as well as the objectives to be optimized, differ in the different disciplines; nevertheless, there are remarkable similarities (as well as significant differences) in the general framework adopted by researchers in scheduling theory in these disparate disciplines.

The primary objectives are to bring together leading and promising young researchers in the different communities to discuss scheduling problems that arise in current and future technology; to expose each community to the important problems addressed by the other communities; and to facilitate a transfer of solution techniques from each community to the others. We anticipate great benefits in having members of the operations research and theoretical computer science community work on solving some of the wide range of ''real-life'' problems that confront the real-time and embedded systems communities in the systems that they design and implement, and in exposing members of the real-time and embedded systems community to the latest theoretical advances so that they have a greater range of advanced techniques to help them design and analyze the systems that they build. By bringing these communities together, we expect that they can learn from each other, and foster great interaction in the future.

The format of the seminar will be designed to encourage members of each community to present interesting open problems that may be amenable to solution using techniques known by members of the other communities. Hence, one hoped-for outcome is the solution of important open problems, either during the seminar itself or (perhaps more likely) as follow-up research that builds upon work initiated during the seminar. In addition, a few tutorial-style presentations will be made by members of each community, introducing their most important techniques to the other communities. It is expected that such exposure to new techniques will help members of all participating communities further their research agendas in the future.