Abstract
The black and white bin packing problem is a variant of the classical bin packing problem, where in addition to a size, each item also has a color (black or white), and in each bin the colors of items must alternate. The problem has been studied extensively, but the best competitive online algorithm has competitiveness of 3. The competitiveness of 3 can be forced even when the sizes of items are ‘halved’, i.e. the sizes are restricted to be in (0, 1 / 2]. We give the first ‘better than 3’ competitive algorithm for the problem for the case that item sizes are in the range (0, 1 / 2]; our algorithm has competitiveness \(\frac{8}{3}\).
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Acknowledgment
Author Wolfgang Bein conducted this research while on sabbatical at Kyoto University, Japan. A sabbatical from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and support from National Science Foundation grant IIA 1427584 is acknowledged.
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Chen, J., Han, X., Bein, W., Ting, HF. (2015). Black and White Bin Packing Revisited. In: Lu, Z., Kim, D., Wu, W., Li, W., Du, DZ. (eds) Combinatorial Optimization and Applications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9486. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26626-8_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26626-8_4
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