An EPTAS for minimizing the total weighted completion time of jobs with release dates on uniformly related machines

Scheduling of independent jobs with release dates so as to minimize the total weighted completion time is a well-known scheduling problem. Here, we study it for the classic machine environment of uniformly related machines. An efficient polynomial time approximation scheme (an EPTAS) is a family of (Formula presented) -approximation algorithms where the running time is bounded from above by a polynomial in the input size times a function of ε > 0. For problems that are NP-hard in the strong sense, as it is the case for the problem studied here, an EPTAS is the best possible approximation scheme. We design an EPTAS for the problem by employing known techniques and introducing a large collection of new methods.