Scheduling

Summary

The primary objective of the seminar is to facilitate dialog and collaboration between researchers in two different mathematically-oriented scheduling research communities, the stochastic scheduling and queuing community, and the worst-case approximation scheduling community. To a large extent, the applications considered by the two communities are the same. The stochastic community considers questions related to determining stochastic information (like the expectation or tail bounds) about the performance of algorithms and systems from stochastic information about the input. The worst-case community considers questions related to determining the worst-case performance of algorithms and systems assuming no stochastic information about the input. Each community has developed its own set of mathematical techniques that are best suited to answer these different sorts of questions. While addressing similar problems, these communities tend to attend different conferences (e.g. SIGMETRICS vs. SODA/IPCO), and publish in different journals. Thus the organizers believed that each community would benefit from greater interaction with the other community, and this seminar was an opportunity to further such interaction. The seminar was attended by about 15 researchers from the stochastic community and 40 researchers from the worst-case community.