Finding shuffle words that represent optimal scheduling of shared memory access

In the present paper, we introduce and study the problem of computing, for any given finite set of words, a shuffle word with a minimum so-called scope coincidence degree. The scope coincidence degree is the maximum number of different symbols that parenthesise any position in the shuffle word. This problem is motivated by an application of a new automaton model and can be regarded as the problem of scheduling shared memory accesses of some parallel processes in a way that minimises the number of memory cells required. We investigate the complexity of this problem and show that it can be solved in polynomial time.