Summary: Fair versus Unrestricted Bin Packing
Yossi Azar 1? , Joan Boyar 2?? , Lene M. Favrholdt 2 ,
Kim S. Larsen 2?? , and Morten N. Nielsen 2
1 Department of Computer Science, Tel­Aviv University, azar@math.tau.ac.il
2 Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Southern
Denmark, Odense, fjoan,lenem,kslarsen,nyhaveg@imada.sdu.dk.
Abstract. We consider the Unrestricted Bin Packing problem where we
have bins of equal size and a sequence of items. The goal is to maximize
the number of items that are packed in the bins by an on­line algorithm.
We investigate the power of performing admission control on the items,
i.e., rejecting items while there is enough space to pack them, versus
behaving fairly, i.e., rejecting an item only when there is not enough
space to pack it. We show that by performing admission control on the
items, we get better performance for various measures compared with
the performance achieved on the fair version of the problem. Our main
result shows that we can pack 2=3 of the items for sequences in which
the optimal can pack all the items.
1 Introduction
1.1 General
In this paper, we are investigating the competitive ratio for a bin packing prob­

Source: Azar, Yossi - School of Computer Science, Tel Aviv University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences