Abstract
We consider the online facility assignment problem, with a set of facilities F of equal capacity l in metric space and customers arriving one by one in an online manner. We must assign customer ci to facility fj before the next customer ci+1 arrives. The cost of this assignment is the distance between ci and fj. The total number of customers is at most |F|l and each customer must be assigned to a facility. The objective is to minimize the sum of all assignment costs. We first consider the case where facilities are placed on a line so that the distance between adjacent facilities is the same and customers appear anywhere on the line. We describe a greedy algorithm with competitive ratio 4|F| and another one with competitive ratio |F|. We also consider a slightly more general situation where different facilities may have different capacities. Finally, we study a variant of the online facility assignment problem in which the facilities are placed on the vertices of a graph and present two algorithms for that setting.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 455-467 |
Number of pages | 13 |
Journal | Theoretical Computer Science |
Volume | 806 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Feb 2 2020 |
Externally published | Yes |
Keywords
- Greedy algorithms
- Online facility assignment
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Theoretical Computer Science
- General Computer Science