Online algorithms - What is it worth to know the future?

Abstract

Sometimes we have to find solutions for optimization problems where the problem specification is not completely known from the beginning. These are called online problems, and the parameters become known only little by little. In this chapter the authors are preparing for a skiing holiday, and they must decide whether it is better to buy or rent skis although they don't yet know whether they will reuse them later. The authors then analyze another online problem, paging - deciding which memory pages should reside in the main memory of a computer and which ones should reside on hard disk only. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.