Competitive algorithms for on-line problems

  • Authors:
  • Mark Manasse;Lyle McGeoch;Daniel Sleator

  • Affiliations:
  • DEC Systems Research Center, 130 Lytton Avenue, Palo Alto, CA;Department of Mathematics, Amherst College, Amherst, MA;Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

  • Venue:
  • STOC '88 Proceedings of the twentieth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
  • Year:
  • 1988

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Abstract

An on-line problem is one in which an algorithm must handle a sequence of requests, satisfying each request without knowledge of the future requests. Examples of on-line problems include scheduling the motion of elevators, finding routes in networks, allocating cache memory, and maintaining dynamic data structures. A competitive algorithm for an on-line problem has the property that its performance on any sequence of requests is within a constant factor of the performance of any other algorithm on the same sequence. This paper presents several general results concerning competitive algorithms, as well as results on specific on-line problems.