Procrastination-aware scheduling: A bipartite graph perspective

Procrastination is a prevalent form of self-control failure. As it often concerns with the individual's ability to meet the deadline, an efficient time management is crucial for overcoming it. Though a considerable amount of work in behavioral economics provides useful insights, there is not a computational way to guide us how to obtain an appropriate schedule for all the things to be done, especially when the relationship of the deadlines is intrinsic. In this paper, we first propose the Procrastination-aware Scheduling Problem (PSP) to model an appropriate schedule. A bipartite graph formulation is then developed to further illustrate the concepts. We find the PSP is NP-hard in the strong sense and design an approximation algorithm. In addition, we note the significance of the PSP under the online scenario (called OnlinePSP). Finally, we verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms through extensive experiments on real datasets.