Common-Deadline Lazy Bureaucrat Scheduling Problems

The lazy bureaucrat scheduling is a new class of scheduling problems that was introduced in [1]. In these problems, there is one employee (or more) who should perform the assigned jobs. The objective of the employee is to minimize the amount of work he performs and to be as inefficient as possible. He is subject to a constraint, however, that he should be busy when there is some work to do. In this paper, we focus on the cases of this problem where all jobs have the same common deadline. We show that with this constraint, the problem is still NP-hard, and prove some hardness results. We then present a tight 2-approximation algorithm for this problem under one of the defined objective functions. Moreover, we prove that this problem is weakly NP-hard under all objective functions, and present a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for its general case.