Excerpt from On-Line Maintenance of Optimal Schedules for a Single MachineEfficient schedule updating methods are especially important for real time planning and control. Consider, for instance, the following bidding scheme for assigning tasks in a distributed processing system (see, for example, Ramamritham and Stankovic Zhao and Ramarnritharn Malone et al. Jobs with varying processing requirements and due dates arrive randomly at different processor locations. Each processor maintains and updates its own local schedule. When a new job enters the system (or when a processor fails), the source node (or a central coordinator) queries the other processors to determine their expected completion time before deciding where to dispatch the job. To formulate its response, each target processor must adjust its current schedule to accomodate the new job and determine its tentative completion time. Subsequently, when the job is awarded to a processor, the selected processor must again update its schedule. Given the possibly large volume of job announcements and reassignments, devising efficient updating algorithms to accomodate new jobs is clearly critical for this type of real-time control mechanism.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.