Abstract
This paper studies a variation of online bin packing where there is a capacitated buffer to temporarily store items during packing, and item size is bounded within \((\alpha , 1/2]\) for some \(0\le \alpha < 1/2\). The problem is motivated by surgery scheduling such that we regard the planned uniform available time interval in each day as a unit size bin and surgeries as items to be packed. Our focus is on the asymptotic performance of NF (Next Fit) and NF-based online algorithms. We show that the classical NF algorithm without use of the buffer has an asymptotic competitive ratio of \(2/(1+\alpha )\). An NF-based algorithm which makes use of the buffer is further proposed, and proved to be asymptotic 13/9-competitive for any given buffer size not less than 1. We also present a lower bound of 4/3.
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Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 71172189, 71172197 and 71131006, Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (no. NCET-12-0824), DHU Distinguished Young Professor Program (no. A201305) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (no. 2232013D3-46).
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Zheng, F., Luo, L. & Zhang, E. NF-based algorithms for online bin packing with buffer and bounded item size. J Comb Optim 30, 360–369 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-014-9771-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-014-9771-8