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We study the Online Budgeted Maximum Coverage (OBMC) problem. Subsets of a weighted ground set U arrive one by one, where each set has a cost. The online algorithm has to select a collection of sets, under the constraint that their cost is at most a given budget. Upon arrival of a set the algorithm must decide whether to accept or to reject the arriving set, and it may also drop previously accepted sets (preemption). Rejecting or dropping a set is irrevocable. The goal is to maximize the total weight of the elements covered by the sets in the chosen collection.
We present a deterministic 4/(1-r)-competitive algorithm for OBMC, where r is the maximum ratio between the cost of a set and
the total budget. Building on that algorithm, we then present a randomized O(1)-competitive algorithm for OBMC. On the other hand, we show that the competitive ratio of any deterministic online algorithm is Omega(1/(sqrt{1-r})).
We also give a deterministic O(Delta)-competitive algorithm, where Delta is the maximum weight of a set (given that the minimum element weight is 1), and if the total weight of all elements, w(U), is known in advance, we show that a slight modification of that algorithm is O(min{Delta,sqrt{w(U)}})-competitive. A matching lower bound of Omega(min{Delta,sqrt{w(U)}}) is also given.
Previous to the present work, only the unit cost version of OBMC was studied under the online setting, giving a 4-competitive algorithm [Saha, Getoor, 2009]. Finally, our results, including the lower bounds, apply to Removable Online Knapsack which is the preemptive version of the Online Knapsack problem.
@InProceedings{rawitz_et_al:LIPIcs.ESA.2016.73,
author = {Rawitz, Dror and Ros\'{e}n, Adi},
title = {{Online Budgeted Maximum Coverage}},
booktitle = {24th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA 2016)},
pages = {73:1--73:17},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-015-6},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2016},
volume = {57},
editor = {Sankowski, Piotr and Zaroliagis, Christos},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2016.73},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-64146},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ESA.2016.73},
annote = {Keywords: budgeted coverage, maximum coverage, online algorithms, competitive analysis, removable online knapsack}
}