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Refining the Complexity Landscape of Speed Scaling: Hardness and Algorithms

Authors Antonios Antoniadis , Denise Graafsma , Ruben Hoeksma , Maria Vlasiou

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LIPIcs.STACS.2026.7.pdf
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Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Design and analysis of algorithms
Keywords
  • energy-efficient algorithms
  • scheduling
  • flow-time minimization
  • linear program
  • NP-hard
  • speed scaling

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Abstract

We study the computational complexity of scheduling jobs on a single speed-scalable processor with the objective of capturing the trade-off between the (weighted) flow time and the energy consumption. This trade-off has been extensively explored in the literature through a number of problem formulations that differ in the specific job characteristics and the precise objective function. Nevertheless, the computational complexity of four important problem variants has remained unresolved and was explicitly identified as an open question in prior work (see [Barcelo et al., 2015]). In this paper, we settle the complexity of these variants. 
More specifically, we prove that the problem of minimizing the objective of total (weighted) flow time plus energy is NP-hard for the cases of (i) unit-weight jobs with arbitrary sizes, and (ii) arbitrary-weight jobs with unit sizes. These results extend to the objective of minimizing the total (weighted) flow time subject to an energy budget and hold even when the schedule is required to adhere to a given priority ordering. 
In contrast, we show that when a completion-time ordering is provided, the same problem variants become polynomial-time solvable. The latter result highlights the subtle differences between priority and completion orderings for the problem.

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Antonios Antoniadis, Denise Graafsma, Ruben Hoeksma, and Maria Vlasiou. Refining the Complexity Landscape of Speed Scaling: Hardness and Algorithms. In 43rd International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2026). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 364, pp. 7:1-7:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2026) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2026.7

Author Details

Antonios Antoniadis
  • University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
Denise Graafsma
  • University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
Ruben Hoeksma
  • University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
Maria Vlasiou
  • University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

Funding

This research is conducted in the scope of Modular Integrated Sustainable Data Center (MISD) project which received funding from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) under the 8ra initiative (IPCEI-CIS).

References

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