Online traveling salesman problem with time cost and non-zealous server

Abstract

Considering that the time of meeting the demands is very important for emergency vehicle and emergency vehicle can’t reject any request, we introduce a more realistic cost form into online traveling salesman problem(OL-TSP). When a new request arrives, if the salesman can’t serve the request immediately, per-unit-time cost will be generated. The goal is to minimize server’s total costs(travel makespan plus the per-unit-time costs). We consider the server is a non-zealous server and show that neither deterministic nor randomized online algorithms can achieve constant competitive ratio for OL-TSP on general metric space. While on truncated line segment and uniform metric space, we prove lower bounds, and present competitive online algorithms. Especially for the case with uniform metric space, we prove an optimal Greedy algorithm.