Online Allocation Problem with Two-sided Resource Constraints

Abstract

Motivated by many interesting real-world applications in logistics and online advertising, we consider an online allocation problem subject to lower and upper resource constraints, where the requests arrive sequentially, sampled i.i.d. from an unknown distribution, and we need to promptly make a decision given limited resources and lower bounds requirements. First, with knowledge of the measure of feasibility, i.e., α, we propose a new algorithm that obtains 1 − O( ǫ α−ǫ )competitive for the offline problems that know the entire requests ahead of time. Inspired by the previous study (Devanur et al., 2019), this algorithm adopts an innovative technique to dynamically update a threshold price vector for making decisions. Moreover, an optimization method to estimate the optimal measure of feasibility is proposed with theoretical guarantee at the end of this paper. Based on this method, if we tolerate slight violation of the lower bounds constraints with parameter η, the proposed algorithm is naturally extended to the settings without strong feasible assumption, which cover the significantly unexplored infeasible scenarios.