This paper is concerned with scheduling when the data are not fully known
before the execution. In that case computing a complete schedule off-line
with estimated data may lead to poor performances. Some flexibility must be
added to the scheduling process. We propose to start from a partial schedule and to postpone the complete scheduling until execution, thus introducing what we call a stabilization
scheme. This is applied to the m machine problem with communication
delays: in our model an estimation of
the delay is known at compile time; but disturbances due to network
contention, link
failures, ... may occur at execution time. Hence the processor assignment and a partial sequencing on each processor are determined off-line. Some theoretical
results for tree-like precedence constraints
and an experimental study show the interest of this approach
compared with fully on-line scheduling.