Patent ID: 8433599

Claim:
A method for determining incentives for workers, the method comprising: receiving, by a computer, an input comprising a set of x jobs X and processing times of each worker {t(i)} (1≦i≦n) and a set of jobs W(A, X, t(i), t(−i)) assigned to each worker i, where A is a given scheduling algorithm; determining, with the computer, MaxInc(X, t(i)) by recursively solving MaxInc(X, t(i))=Σ_{wεX} t(i, Kind(w))+max_{s(i)εSlower(t(i))} MaxInc(X, s(i)) through the processing by the computer; and using MaxInc(X, t(i)) to calculate an incentive NewInc(A, X, t(i), t(−i)) for each worker i based on NewInc(A, X, t(i), t(−i))=Σ_{wεW(A, X, t(i), t(−i))} t(i, Kind(w))+max_{s(i)εSlower(t(i))} MaxInc(X, s(i)), where s(i) is a vector representing a pseudo-processing time, wherein: k job types are denoted as K={1, 2, . . . , k}; n workers are denoted as M={1, 2, . . . , n}; a time required for a worker i to process a job of a type j is denoted as t(i,j); a type of a job w is denoted as Kind(w); t(i) represents a vector (t(i,1), t(i,2), . . . , t(i,k)); t(−i) is a vector (t(1), t(2), t(i−1), t(t+1), . . . , t(n)) representing processing times of n−1 workers in the n workers except a worker i; values that t(i,j) can take for each job type are finite and common to all the workers; a finite set of processing times for a type j is denoted as T(j); T(j) is an ordered set whose elements are processing times; processing time intervals in the ordered set are uniform for each job type; T=T(1)× . . . ×T(k) represents a processing time vector set for workers; and a set of all processing time vectors slower than t, given tεT, is denoted as Slower(t).