Online Deterministic Minimum Cost Bipartite Matching with Delays on a Line

We study the online minimum cost bipartite perfect matching with delays problem. In this problem, m servers and m requests arrive over time, and an online algorithm can delay the matching between servers and requests by paying the delay cost. The objective is to minimize the total distance and delay cost. When servers and requests lie in a known metric space, there is a randomized $$O(\log n)$$ -competitive algorithm, where n is the size of the metric space. When the metric space is unknown a priori, Azar and Jacob-Fanani proposed a deterministic $$O\left( \frac{1}{\epsilon }m^{\log \left( \frac{3+\epsilon }{2}\right) }\right) $$ -competitive algorithm for any fixed $$\epsilon > 0$$ . This competitive ratio is tight when $$n = 1$$ and becomes $$O(m^{0.59})$$ for sufficiently small $$\epsilon $$ . We improve upon the result of Azar and Jacob-Fanani for the case where servers and requests are on the real line, providing a deterministic $$\tilde{O}(m^{0.5})$$ -competitive algorithm. Our algorithm is based on the Robust Matching (RM) algorithm proposed by Raghvendra for the minimum cost bipartite perfect matching problem. In this problem, delay is not allowed, and all servers arrive in the beginning. When a request arrives, the RM algorithm immediately matches the request to a free server based on the request’s minimum t-net-cost augmenting path, where $$t > 1$$ is a constant. In our algorithm, we delay the matching of a request until its waiting time exceeds its minimum t-net-cost divided by t.