On the Power of Spatial Locality on Online Routing Problems

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Autori principali: Guragain, Swapnil, Sharma, Gokarna
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Guragain, Swapnil
Sharma, Gokarna
author_facet Guragain, Swapnil
Sharma, Gokarna
contents We consider the online versions of two fundamental routing problems, traveling salesman (TSP) and dial-a-ride (DARP), which have a variety of relevant applications in logistics and robotics. The online versions of these problems concern with efficiently serving a sequence of requests presented in a real-time on-line fashion located at points of a metric space by servers (salesmen/vehicles/robots). In this paper, motivated from real-world applications, such as Uber/Lyft rides, where some limited knowledge is available on the future requests, we propose the {\em spatial locality} model that provides in advance the distance within which new request(s) will be released from the current position of server(s). We study the usefulness of this advanced information on achieving the improved competitive ratios for both the problems with $k\geq 1$ servers, compared to the competitive results established in the literature without such spatial locality consideration. We show that small locality is indeed useful in obtaining improved competitive ratios irrespective of the metric space.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_17517
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Power of Spatial Locality on Online Routing Problems
Guragain, Swapnil
Sharma, Gokarna
Data Structures and Algorithms
Multiagent Systems
Robotics
We consider the online versions of two fundamental routing problems, traveling salesman (TSP) and dial-a-ride (DARP), which have a variety of relevant applications in logistics and robotics. The online versions of these problems concern with efficiently serving a sequence of requests presented in a real-time on-line fashion located at points of a metric space by servers (salesmen/vehicles/robots). In this paper, motivated from real-world applications, such as Uber/Lyft rides, where some limited knowledge is available on the future requests, we propose the {\em spatial locality} model that provides in advance the distance within which new request(s) will be released from the current position of server(s). We study the usefulness of this advanced information on achieving the improved competitive ratios for both the problems with $k\geq 1$ servers, compared to the competitive results established in the literature without such spatial locality consideration. We show that small locality is indeed useful in obtaining improved competitive ratios irrespective of the metric space.
title On the Power of Spatial Locality on Online Routing Problems
topic Data Structures and Algorithms
Multiagent Systems
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17517