Improving the Competitive Ratios of the Seat Reservation Problem
Abstract
In the seat reservation problem, there are k stations, s1 through sk, and one train with n seats departing from the station s1 and arriving at the station sk. Each passenger orders a ticket from station si to station sj (1 ≤ i < j ≤ k) by specifying i and j. The task of an online algorithm is to assign one of n seats to each passenger online, i.e., without knowing future requests. The purpose of the problem is to maximize the total price of the sold tickets. There are two models, the unit price problem and the proportional price problem, depending on the pricing policy of tickets. In this paper, we improve upper and lower bounds on the competitive ratios for both models: For the unit price problem, we give an upper bound of 4k−2√k−1+4, which improves the previous bound of 8k+5. We also give an upper bound of 2k−2√k−1+2 for the competitive ratio of Worst-Fit algorithm, which improves the previous bound of 4k−1. For the proportional price problem, we give upper and lower bounds of 3+√13k−1+√13(≃6.6k+2.6) and 2k−1, respectively, on the competitive ratio, which improves the previous bounds of 4+2√13k+3+2√13(≃11.2k+10.2) and 1k−1, respectively.
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