Competitive Online Transportation Simplified
Abstract
The setting for the online transportation problem is a metric space , populated by parking garages of varying capacities. Over time cars arrive in , and must be irrevocably assigned to a parking garage upon arrival in a way that respects the garage capacities. The objective is to minimize the aggregate distance traveled by the cars. In 1998, Kalyanasundaram and Pruhs conjectured that there is a -competitive deterministic algorithm for the online transportation problem, matching the optimal competitive ratio for the simpler online metric matching problem. Recently, Harada and Itoh presented the first -competitive deterministic algorithm for the online transportation problem. Our contribution is an alternative algorithm design and analysis that we believe is simpler.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.08381,
title = {Competitive Online Transportation Simplified},
author = {Stephen Arndt and Benjamin Moseley and Kirk Pruhs and Marc Uetz},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.08381},
year = {2025}
}