Examination of Fairness in Scheduling Tasks with Heterogeneous Resources

The question of fairness has been raised in many different areas, e.g. in decision support systems, legal issues or economics. In scheduling tasks, it is not easy to know when scheduling can be called fair.We have examined previous rostering approaches to this issue, and experience shows no general formulation of fairness. Different task-specific solutions are used, or equity is defined for more straightforward, homogeneous resource scheduling. In practice, however, more complex assignments of heterogeneous groups are more common.There is also a need for a more general formulation of fairness in scheduling issues. In order to answer this, we give a basic concept for heterogeneous resources, taking into account disjoint and non-disjoint skill-sets.