Batu, Tugkan 
ORCID: 0000-0003-3914-4645, Berenbrink, Petra and Sohler, Christian
(2007)
A sublinear-time approximation scheme for bin packing.
CDAM Research Reports (LSE-CDAM-2007-33).
London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK.
Abstract
The bin packing problem is defined as follows: given a set of n items with sizes 01,w2,..., wn≤ 1, find a packing of these items into minimum number of unit-size bins possible. We present a sublinear-time asymptotic approximation scheme for the bin packing problem; that is, for any ε>0, we present an algorithm Aε that has sampling access to the input instance and outputs a value k such that Copt≤ k≤ (1+ε) Copt+1, where Copt is the cost of an optimal solution. It is clear that uniform sampling by itself will not allow a sublinear-time algorithm in this setting; a small number of items might constitute most of the total weight and uniform samples will not hit them. In this work we use weighted samples, where item i is sampled with probability proportional to its weight: that is, with probability wi/∑i wi. In the presence of weighted samples, the approximation algorithm runs in O(n1/2 poly(log(n)/ε)) + g(1/ε) time, where g(x) is an exponential function of x. When both weighted and uniform sampling are allowed, O(n1/3 poly(log(n)/ε)) + g(1/ε) time suffices. In addition to an approximate value to Copt, our algorithm can also output a constant-size ``template'' of a packing that can later be used to find a near-optimal packing in linear time.
| Item Type: | Monograph (Report) |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | http://www.cdam.lse.ac.uk/Reports/ |
| Additional Information: | © 2007 London School of Economics and Political Science |
| Divisions: | Mathematics |
| Subjects: | H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) Q Science > QA Mathematics |
| Date Deposited: | 09 Jul 2008 08:31 |
| Last Modified: | 12 Dec 2024 05:45 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/6717 |
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