Open shop scheduling games

Abstract

This paper takes a game theoretical approach to open shop scheduling problems with unit execution times to minimize the sum of completion times. By supposing an initial schedule and associating each job (consisting in a number of operations) to a different player, we can construct a cooperative TU-game associated with any open shop scheduling problem. We assign to each coalition the maximal cost savings it can obtain through admissible rearrangements of jobs' operations. By providing a core allocation, we show that the associated games are balanced. Finally, we relax the definition of admissible rearrangements for a coalition to study to what extend balancedness still holds.