Perpetual maintenance of machines with different urgency requirements

Abstract

A garden is populated by n bamboos, each with its own daily growth rate. The Bamboo Garden Trimming Problem (BGT) is to design for a robotic gardener a perpetual schedule of cutting bamboos to keep the elevation of the garden as low as possible. The frequency of cutting is constrained by the time needed to move from one bamboo to the next, which is one day in Discrete BGT and is defined by the distance between the two bamboos in Continuous BGT. The bamboo garden is a metaphor for a collection of machines which have to be serviced, with different frequencies, by a robot which can service only one machine at a time. For Discrete BGT, we show tighter approximation algorithms, with one of them settling a long-standing conjecture about the related Pinwheel problem. For Continuous BGT, we propose approximation algorithms which achieve logarithmic approximation ratios.