News from the Online Traveling Repairman

In the traveling repairman problem (Trp), a tour must be found through every one of a set of points (cities) in some metric space such that the weighted sum of completion times of the cities is minimized. Given a tour, the completion time of a city is the time traveled on the tour before the city is reached. In the online traveling repairman problem OlTrp requests for visits to cities arrive online while the repairman is traveling. We analyze the performance of algorithms for the online problem using competitive analysis, where the cost of an online algorithm is compared to that of an optimal offline algorithm. Feuerstein and Stougie [8] present a 9-competitive algorithm for the OlTrp on the real line. In this paper we show how to use techniques from online-scheduling to obtain a 6-competitive deterministic algorithm for the OlTrp on any metric space. We also present a randomized algorithm with competitive ratio of 3 ln 2 < 4.3281 against an oblivious adversary. Our results extend t...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: MFCS
• Authors: Sven Oliver Krumke, Willem de Paepe, Diana Poensgen, Leen Stougie
• Keywords: Algorithm, Metric Spaces, MFCS 2001, Theoretical Computer Science, Traveling Repairman Problem