New Competitive Analysis Results of Online List Scheduling Algorithm

Online algorithm has been an emerging area of interest for researchers in various domains of computer science. The online $m$-machine list scheduling problem introduced by Graham has gained theoretical as well as practical significance in the development of competitive analysis as a performance measure for online algorithms. In this paper, we study and explore the performance of Graham's online \textit{list scheduling algorithm(LSA)} for independent jobs. In the literature, \textit{LSA} has already been proved to be $2-\frac{1}{m}$ competitive, where $m$ is the number of machines. We present two new upper bound results on competitive analysis of \textit{LSA}. We obtain upper bounds on the competitive ratio of $2-\frac{2}{m}$ and $2-\frac{m^2-m+1}{m^2}$ respectively for practically significant two special classes of input job sequences. Our analytical results can motivate the practitioners to design improved competitive online algorithms for the $m$-machine list scheduling problem by characterization of real life input sequences.

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