Preemptive job-shop scheduling problems with a fixed number of jobs

It is shown that the two machine preemptive job-shop problem with mean flow-time or makespan objective function and three jobs is NP-hard. This contrasts the fact that the nonpreemptive versions of these problems are polynomially solvable if the number of jobs is arbitrary but fixed. It is also shown that the preemptive problems can be solved pseudopolynomially if both the number of machines and the number of jobs is fixed. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 1999