A general scheme for solving a large set of scheduling problems with rejection in FPT time

Mnich and Wiese (Math Program 154:533–562, 2015) proved that the NP-hard single-machine scheduling problem with rejection and the total weighted completion time plus total rejection cost as objective is fixed parameter tractable with respect to the number of different processing times and weights in the instance. This result is obtained by reducing the problem to an integer convex programming problem where the number of variables depends solely on the parameter (number of different processing times and weights). We show that this method can be incorporated into a more general scheme for solving a large set of scheduling problems with rejection which share common properties. These problems include various different machine environments, namely single machine, identical machines in parallel, and flow-shops.