English

Finite Pinwheel Covering

Data Structures and Algorithms 2026-07-30 v1

Abstract

In perpetual scheduling theory, the Pinwheel Covering problem asks, given nn frequencies fif_i, whether there exists an infinite schedule such that every fif_i consecutive entries contain at most one occurrence of i[n]i\in [n]. This models nn agents taking turns at executing a job, with a recovery period before working again. Pinwheel Covering is, in a sense, the dual of Pinwheel Packing (also known as Pinwheel Scheduling), which similarly asks for at least one occurrence of ii in every fif_i consecutive entries. The complexity of both problems is a major open question: both are known to be in PSPACE, but PSPACE-hardness remains unknown. Recently, a finite version of Pinwheel Packing requiring only kk occurrences of i[n]i\in [n] was introduced by [Kanellopoulos et al., SODA 2026] and proven to be strongly NP-complete. In this work we introduce kk-Visits Covering, the analogous finite version of Pinwheel Covering, establishing strong NP-completeness even for k=2k=2. As a corollary, we obtain that a generalization of Pinwheel Covering with varying frequencies is strongly NP-hard. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first strong NP-hardness result in the covering setting. We complement these results with a linear-time algorithm for 22-Visits Covering with two distinct frequencies and a randomized polynomial-time algorithm when the number of distinct frequencies is constant. Lastly, we study the density thresholds of kk-Visits Covering and prove that no non-trivial density bounds exist, contrasting the finite packing version.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.28574,
  title  = {Finite Pinwheel Covering},
  author = {Sotiris Kanellopoulos},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.28574},
  year   = {2026}
}