Makespan Minimization with OR-Precedence Constraints

We consider a variant of the NP-hard problem of assigning jobs to machines to minimize the completion time of the last job. Usually, precedence constraints are given by a partial order on the set of jobs, and each job requires all its predecessors to be completed before it can start. In his seminal paper, Graham (1966) presented a simple 2-approximation algorithm, and, more than 40 years later, Svensson (2010) proved that 2 is essentially the best approximation ratio one can hope for in general. In this paper, we consider a different type of precedence relation that has not been discussed as extensively and is called OR-precedence. In order for a job to start, we require that at least one of its predecessors is completed - in contrast to all its predecessors. Additionally, we assume that each job has a release date before which it must not start. We prove that Graham's algorithm has an approximation guarantee of 2 also in this setting, and present a polynomial-time algorithm that solves the problem to optimality, if preemptions are allowed. The latter result is in contrast to classical precedence constraints, for which Ullman (1975) showed that the preemptive variant is already NP-hard. Our algorithm generalizes a result of Johannes (2005) who gave a polynomial-time algorithm for unit processing time jobs subject to OR-precedence constraints, but without release dates. The performance guarantees presented here match the best-known ones for special cases where classical precedence constraints and OR-precedence constraints coincide.