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

Improved lower bounds for the online bin packing problem with cardinality constraints

The bin packing problem has been extensively studied and numerous variants have been considered. The k-item bin packing problem is one of the variants introduced by Krause et al. (J ACM 22:522-550, 1975). In addition to the formulation of the classical bin packing problem, this problem imposes a cardinality constraint that the number of items packed into each bin must be at most k. For the online setting of this problem, in which the items are given one by one, Babel et al. (Discret Appl Math 143: 238-251, 2004) provided lower boundsv root 2 approximate to 1.41421 and 1.5 on the asymptotic competitive ratio for k = 2 and 3, respectively. For k >= 4, some lower bounds (e.g., by van Vliet (Inf Process Lett 43:277-284, 1992) for the online bin packing problem, i.e., a problem without cardinality constraints, can be applied to this problem. In this paper we consider the online k-item bin packing problem. First, we improve the previous lower bound 1.41421 to 1.42764 for k = 2. Moreover, we propose a new method to derive lower bounds for general k and present improved bounds for various cases of k >= 4. For example, we improve 1.33333 to 1.5 for k = 4, and 1.33333 to 1.47058 for k = 5.ArticleJOURNAL OF COMBINATORIAL OPTIMIZATION. 29(1): 67-87 (2015)journal articl

Fully-Dynamic Bin Packing with Little Repacking

We study the classic bin packing problem in a fully-dynamic setting, where new items can arrive and old items may depart. We want algorithms with low asymptotic competitive ratio while repacking items sparingly between updates. Formally, each item i has a movement cost c_i >= 0, and we want to use alpha * OPT bins and incur a movement cost gamma * c_i, either in the worst case, or in an amortized sense, for alpha, gamma as small as possible. We call gamma the recourse of the algorithm. This is motivated by cloud storage applications, where fully-dynamic bin packing models the problem of data backup to minimize the number of disks used, as well as communication incurred in moving file backups between disks. Since the set of files changes over time, we could recompute a solution periodically from scratch, but this would give a high number of disk rewrites, incurring a high energy cost and possible wear and tear of the disks. In this work, we present optimal tradeoffs between number of bins used and number of items repacked, as well as natural extensions of the latter measure