Time- and Resource-Constrained Scheduling for Digital Microfluidic Biochips

Digital microfluidic biochips (DMFBs) are a class of software-programmable laboratories-on-a-chip capable of automating and miniaturizing biochemical assays. Many assays feature time-sensitive interactions which are not supported by existing programming languages or compilers. This paper presents high-level language annotations to allow programmers to specify assays that feature time-sensitive dependencies between operations. To provide compiler support, this paper also presents a new formulation of a microfluidic scheduling problem for DMFBs that enforces timing constraints. To solve the problem, which is NP-complete, the paper introduces an efficient heuristic, along with an optimal Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation. Experiments demonstrate that existing methods for the traditional scheduling problem often do not yield solutions that satisfy time-sensitive constraints, while the proposed methods can do so while also effectively minimizing the total execution time of a scheduled assay.