Generalized Capacity Planning for the Hospital-Residents Problem

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Balasundaram, Haricharan, Limaye, Girija, Nasre, Meghana, Raja, Abhinav
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Balasundaram, Haricharan
Limaye, Girija
Nasre, Meghana
Raja, Abhinav
author_facet Balasundaram, Haricharan
Limaye, Girija
Nasre, Meghana
Raja, Abhinav
contents The Hospital Residents setting models important problems like school choice, assignment of undergraduate students to degree programs, among many others. In this setting, fixed quotas are associated with the programs that limit the number of agents that can be assigned to them. Motivated by scenarios where all agents must be matched, we propose and study a generalized capacity planning problem, which allows cost-controlled flexibility with respect to quotas. Our setting is an extension of the Hospital Resident setting where programs have the usual quota as well as an associated cost, indicating the cost of matching an agent beyond the initial quotas. We seek to compute a matching that matches all agents and is optimal with respect to preferences, and minimizes either a local or a global objective on cost. We show that there is a sharp contrast -- minimizing the local objective is polynomial-time solvable, whereas minimizing the global objective is NP-hard. On the positive side, we present approximation algorithms for the global objective in the general case and a particular hard case. We achieve the approximation guarantee for the special hard case via a linear programming based algorithm. We strengthen the NP-hardness by showing a matching lower bound to our algorithmic result.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23328
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Generalized Capacity Planning for the Hospital-Residents Problem
Balasundaram, Haricharan
Limaye, Girija
Nasre, Meghana
Raja, Abhinav
Data Structures and Algorithms
The Hospital Residents setting models important problems like school choice, assignment of undergraduate students to degree programs, among many others. In this setting, fixed quotas are associated with the programs that limit the number of agents that can be assigned to them. Motivated by scenarios where all agents must be matched, we propose and study a generalized capacity planning problem, which allows cost-controlled flexibility with respect to quotas. Our setting is an extension of the Hospital Resident setting where programs have the usual quota as well as an associated cost, indicating the cost of matching an agent beyond the initial quotas. We seek to compute a matching that matches all agents and is optimal with respect to preferences, and minimizes either a local or a global objective on cost. We show that there is a sharp contrast -- minimizing the local objective is polynomial-time solvable, whereas minimizing the global objective is NP-hard. On the positive side, we present approximation algorithms for the global objective in the general case and a particular hard case. We achieve the approximation guarantee for the special hard case via a linear programming based algorithm. We strengthen the NP-hardness by showing a matching lower bound to our algorithmic result.
title Generalized Capacity Planning for the Hospital-Residents Problem
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23328