We study an on-line scheduling problem that is motivated by applications such as car-sharing, in which users submit ride requests, and the scheduler aims to accept requests of maximum total profit using k servers (cars). Each ride request specifies the pick-up time and the pick-up location (among two locations, with the other location being the destination). The scheduler has to decide whether or not to accept a request immediately at the time when the request is submitted (booking time). We consider two variants of the problem with respect to constraints on the booking time: In the fixed booking time variant, a request must be submitted a fixed amount of time before the pick-up time. In the variable booking time variant, a request can be submitted at any time during a certain time interval (called the booking horizon) that precedes the pick-up time. We present lower bounds on the competitive ratio for both variants and propose a balanced greedy algorithm (BGA) that achieves the best possible competitive ratio. We prove that, for the fixed booking time variant, BGA is 1.5-competitive if k=3i ( i in N) and the fixed booking length is not less than the travel time between the two locations; for the variable booking time variant, BGA is 1.5-competitive if k=3i ( i in N) and the length of the booking horizon is less than the travel time between the two locations, and BGA is 5/3-competitive if k=5i ( i in N) and the length of the booking horizon is not less than the travel time between the two locations.
@InProceedings{luo_et_al:LIPIcs.ISAAC.2018.64, author = {Luo, Kelin and Erlebach, Thomas and Xu, Yinfeng}, title = {{Online Scheduling of Car-Sharing Requests Between Two Locations with Many Cars and Flexible Advance Bookings}}, booktitle = {29th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2018)}, pages = {64:1--64:13}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-094-1}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2018}, volume = {123}, editor = {Hsu, Wen-Lian and Lee, Der-Tsai and Liao, Chung-Shou}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2018.64}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-100122}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2018.64}, annote = {Keywords: Car-sharing system, Competitive analysis, On-line scheduling} }
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