  This paper considers parallel machine scheduling with incompatibilities
between jobs. The jobs form a graph and no two jobs connected by an edge are
allowed to be assigned to the same machine. In particular, we study the case
where the graph is a collection of disjoint cliques. Scheduling with
incompatibilities between jobs represents a well-established line of research
in scheduling theory and the case of disjoint cliques has received increasing
attention in recent years. While the research up to this point has been focused
on the makespan objective, we broaden the scope and study the classical total
completion time criterion. In the setting without incompatibilities, this
objective is well known to admit polynomial time algorithms even for unrelated
machines via matching techniques. We show that the introduction of
incompatibility cliques results in a richer, more interesting picture.
Scheduling on identical machines remains solvable in polynomial time, while
scheduling on unrelated machines becomes APX-hard. Furthermore, we study the
problem under the paradigm of fixed-parameter tractable algorithms (FPT). In
particular, we consider a problem variant with assignment restrictions for the
cliques rather than the jobs. We prove that it is NP-hard and can be solved in
FPT time with respect to the number of cliques. Moreover, we show that the
problem on unrelated machines can be solved in FPT time for reasonable
parameters, e.g., the parameter pair: number of machines and maximum processing
time. The latter result is a natural extension of known results for the case
without incompatibilities and can even be extended to the case of total
weighted completion time. All of the FPT results make use of n-fold Integer
Programs that recently have received great attention by proving their
usefulness for scheduling problems.
