The authors present a semi-definite relaxation algorithm for the scheduling problem with controllable times on a single machine. Their approach shows how to relate this problem with the maximum vertex-cover problem with kernel constraints (MKVC).The established relationship enables to transfer the approximate solutions of MKVCinto the approximate solutions for the scheduling problem. Then, they show how to obtain an integer approximate solution for MKVC based on the semi-definite relaxation and randomized rounding technique.