The Online Knapsack Problem with Departures

Abstract

The online knapsack problem is a classic online resource allocation problem in networking and operations research. Its basic version studies how to pack online arriving items of different sizes and values into a capacity-limited knapsack. In this paper, we study a general version that includes item departures, while also considering multiple knapsacks and multi-dimensional item sizes. We design a threshold-based online algorithm and prove that the algorithm can achieve order-optimal competitive ratios. Beyond worst-case optimized algorithms, we also propose a data-driven online algorithm that can achieve near-optimal average performance under typical instances while guaranteeing the worst-case performance.