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A design point is inessential when it does not contribute to an optimal design, and can therefore be safely discarded from the design space. We derive three inequalities for the detection of such inessential points in c-optimal design: the first two are direct consequences of the equivalence theorem for c-optimality; the third one is derived from a second-order cone programming formulation of c-optimal design. Elimination rules for A-optimal design are obtained as a byproduct. When implemented within an optimization algorithm, each inequality gives a screening test that may provide a substantial acceleration by reducing the size of the problem online. Several examples are presented with a multiplicative algorithm to illustrate the effectiveness of the approach.
We consider the stochastic scheduling problem of minimizing the expected makespan on m parallel identical machines. While the (adaptive) list scheduling policy achieves an approximation ratio of 2, any (non-adaptive) fixed assignment policy has performance guarantee Ω(logm/loglogm). Although the performance of the latter class of policies are worse, there are applications in which non-adaptive policies are desired. In this work, we introduce the two classes of δ-delay and τ-shift policies whose degree of adaptivity can be controlled by a parameter. We present a policy - belonging to both classes - which is an O(loglogm)-approximation for reasonably bounded parameters. In other words, an exponential improvement on the performance of any fixed assignment policy can be achieved when allowing a small degree of adaptivity. Moreover, we provide a matching lower bound for any δ-delay and τ-shift policy when both parameters, respectively, are in the order of the expected makespan of an optimal non-anticipatory policy.