Multi-installment scheduling for coarse-grained divisible loads

The large-scale arbitrarily divisible load scheduling has been solved effectively by periodic multi-installment scheduling (PMIS), but there are relatively few studies on coarse-grained divisible loads. Therefore, we propose a coarse-grained multi-installment scheduling model in this paper, named CMIS. Two crucial issues were solved: First, an optimal load partition was derived through a strict mathematical derivation; Second, an optimal number of installments was obtained between the subtle upper and lower bounds we found. Finally, we compare the proposed model with an up-to-date model and the experimental results show that the proposed model outperforms the existing model in obtaining a shorter makespan.