90 research outputs found
A tight lower bound for an online hypercube packing problem and bounds for prices of anarchy of a related game
We prove a tight lower bound on the asymptotic performance ratio of
the bounded space online -hypercube bin packing problem, solving an open
question raised in 2005. In the classic -hypercube bin packing problem, we
are given a sequence of -dimensional hypercubes and we have an unlimited
number of bins, each of which is a -dimensional unit hypercube. The goal is
to pack (orthogonally) the given hypercubes into the minimum possible number of
bins, in such a way that no two hypercubes in the same bin overlap. The bounded
space online -hypercube bin packing problem is a variant of the
-hypercube bin packing problem, in which the hypercubes arrive online and
each one must be packed in an open bin without the knowledge of the next
hypercubes. Moreover, at each moment, only a constant number of open bins are
allowed (whenever a new bin is used, it is considered open, and it remains so
until it is considered closed, in which case, it is not allowed to accept new
hypercubes). Epstein and van Stee [SIAM J. Comput. 35 (2005), no. 2, 431-448]
showed that is and , and conjectured that
it is . We show that is in fact . To
obtain this result, we elaborate on some ideas presented by those authors, and
go one step further showing how to obtain better (offline) packings of certain
special instances for which one knows how many bins any bounded space algorithm
has to use. Our main contribution establishes the existence of such packings,
for large enough , using probabilistic arguments. Such packings also lead to
lower bounds for the prices of anarchy of the selfish -hypercube bin packing
game. We present a lower bound of for the pure price of
anarchy of this game, and we also give a lower bound of for
its strong price of anarchy
Online Bin Covering: Expectations vs. Guarantees
Bin covering is a dual version of classic bin packing. Thus, the goal is to
cover as many bins as possible, where covering a bin means packing items of
total size at least one in the bin.
For online bin covering, competitive analysis fails to distinguish between
most algorithms of interest; all "reasonable" algorithms have a competitive
ratio of 1/2. Thus, in order to get a better understanding of the combinatorial
difficulties in solving this problem, we turn to other performance measures,
namely relative worst order, random order, and max/max analysis, as well as
analyzing input with restricted or uniformly distributed item sizes. In this
way, our study also supplements the ongoing systematic studies of the relative
strengths of various performance measures.
Two classic algorithms for online bin packing that have natural dual versions
are Harmonic and Next-Fit. Even though the algorithms are quite different in
nature, the dual versions are not separated by competitive analysis. We make
the case that when guarantees are needed, even under restricted input
sequences, dual Harmonic is preferable. In addition, we establish quite robust
theoretical results showing that if items come from a uniform distribution or
even if just the ordering of items is uniformly random, then dual Next-Fit is
the right choice.Comment: IMADA-preprint-c
- …