  Intelligent reflecting surface (IRS) and rate-splitting multiple access
(RSMA) technologies are at the forefront of enhancing spectrum and energy
efficiency in the next generation multi-antenna communication systems. This
paper explores a RSMA system with multiple IRSs, and proposes two
purpose-driven scheduling schemes, i.e., the exhaustive IRS-aided (EIA) and
opportunistic IRS-aided (OIA) schemes. The aim is to optimize the system
weighted energy efficiency (EE) under the above two schemes, respectively.
Specifically, the Dinkelbach, branch and bound, successive convex
approximation, and the semidefinite relaxation methods are exploited within the
alternating optimization framework to obtain effective solutions to the
considered problems. The numerical findings indicate that the EIA scheme
exhibits better performance compared to the OIA scheme in diverse scenarios
when considering the weighted EE, and the proposed algorithm demonstrates
superior performance in comparison to the baseline algorithms.
