Analyzing Branch-and-Bound Algorithms for the Multiprocessor Scheduling Problem

Abstract

The Multiprocessor Scheduling Problem (MSP) is an NP-Complete problem with significant applications in computer and operations systems. We provide a survey of the wide array of polynomial-time approximation, heuristic, and meta-heuristic based algorithms that exist for solving MSP. We also implement Fujita's state-of-the-art Branch-and-Bound algorithm and evaluate the benefit of using Fujita's binary search bounding method instead of the Fernandez bound. We find that in fact Fujita's method does not offer any improvement over the Fernandez bound on our data set.