24,679 research outputs found
Improved Analysis of two Algorithms for Min-Weighted Sum Bin Packing
We study the Min-Weighted Sum Bin Packing problem, a variant of the classical
Bin Packing problem in which items have a weight, and each item induces a cost
equal to its weight multiplied by the index of the bin in which it is packed.
This is in fact equivalent to a batch scheduling problem that arises in many
fields of applications such as appointment scheduling or warehouse logistics.
We give improved lower and upper bounds on the approximation ratio of two
simple algorithms for this problem. In particular, we show that the
knapsack-batching algorithm, which iteratively solves knapsack problems over
the set of remaining items to pack the maximal weight in the current bin, has
an approximation ratio of at most 17/10
AFPTAS results for common variants of bin packing: A new method to handle the small items
We consider two well-known natural variants of bin packing, and show that
these packing problems admit asymptotic fully polynomial time approximation
schemes (AFPTAS). In bin packing problems, a set of one-dimensional items of
size at most 1 is to be assigned (packed) to subsets of sum at most 1 (bins).
It has been known for a while that the most basic problem admits an AFPTAS. In
this paper, we develop methods that allow to extend this result to other
variants of bin packing. Specifically, the problems which we study in this
paper, for which we design asymptotic fully polynomial time approximation
schemes, are the following. The first problem is "Bin packing with cardinality
constraints", where a parameter k is given, such that a bin may contain up to k
items. The goal is to minimize the number of bins used. The second problem is
"Bin packing with rejection", where every item has a rejection penalty
associated with it. An item needs to be either packed to a bin or rejected, and
the goal is to minimize the number of used bins plus the total rejection
penalty of unpacked items. This resolves the complexity of two important
variants of the bin packing problem. Our approximation schemes use a novel
method for packing the small items. This new method is the core of the improved
running times of our schemes over the running times of the previous results,
which are only asymptotic polynomial time approximation schemes (APTAS)
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An average-case analysis of bin packing with uniformly distributed item sizes
We analyze the one-dimensional bin-packing problem under the assumption that bins have unit capacity, and that items to be packed are drawn from a uniform distribution on [0,1]. Building on some recent work by Frederickson, we give an algorithm which uses n/2+0(n^½) bins on the average to pack n items. (Knodel has achieved a similar result.) The analysis involves the use of a certain 1-dimensional random walk. We then show that even an optimum packing under this distribution uses n/2+0(n^1/2) bins on the average, so our algorithm is asymptotically optimal, up to constant factors on the amount of wasted space. Finally, following Frederickson, we show that two well-known greedy bin-packing algorithms use no more bins than our algorithm; thus their behavior is also in asymptotically optimal in this sense
Overcommitment in Cloud Services -- Bin packing with Chance Constraints
This paper considers a traditional problem of resource allocation, scheduling
jobs on machines. One such recent application is cloud computing, where jobs
arrive in an online fashion with capacity requirements and need to be
immediately scheduled on physical machines in data centers. It is often
observed that the requested capacities are not fully utilized, hence offering
an opportunity to employ an overcommitment policy, i.e., selling resources
beyond capacity. Setting the right overcommitment level can induce a
significant cost reduction for the cloud provider, while only inducing a very
low risk of violating capacity constraints. We introduce and study a model that
quantifies the value of overcommitment by modeling the problem as a bin packing
with chance constraints. We then propose an alternative formulation that
transforms each chance constraint into a submodular function. We show that our
model captures the risk pooling effect and can guide scheduling and
overcommitment decisions. We also develop a family of online algorithms that
are intuitive, easy to implement and provide a constant factor guarantee from
optimal. Finally, we calibrate our model using realistic workload data, and
test our approach in a practical setting. Our analysis and experiments
illustrate the benefit of overcommitment in cloud services, and suggest a cost
reduction of 1.5% to 17% depending on the provider's risk tolerance
Augmented neural networks and problem-structure based heuristics for the bin-packing problem
In this paper, we apply the Augmented-neural-networks (AugNN) approach for solving the classical bin-packing problem (BPP). AugNN is a metaheuristic that combines a priority- rule heuristic with the iterative search approach of neural networks to generate good solutions fast. This is the first time this approach has been applied to the BPP. We also propose a decomposition approach for solving harder BPP, in which sub problems are solved using a combination of AugNN approach and heuristics that exploit the problem structure. We discuss the characteristics of problems on which such problem-structure based heuristics could be applied. We empirically show the effectiveness of the AugNN and the decomposition approach on many benchmark problems in the literature. For the 1210 benchmark problems tested, 917 problems were solved to optimality and the average gap between the obtained solution and the upper bound for all the problems was reduced to under 0.66% and computation time averaged below 33 seconds per problem. We also discuss the computational complexity of our approach
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