k-Times Bin Packing and its Application to Fair Electricity Distribution

Dinesh Kumar Baghel, Alex Ravsky, Erel Segal-Halevi

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Given items of different sizes and a fixed bin capacity, the bin-packing problem is to pack these items into a minimum number of bins such that the sum of item sizes in a bin does not exceed the capacity. We define a new variant called k-times bin-packing (kBP), where the goal is to pack the items such that each item appears exactly k times, in k different bins. We generalize some existing approximation algorithms for bin-packing to solve kBP, and analyze their performance ratio. The study of kBP is motivated by the problem of fair electricity distribution. In many developing countries, the total electricity demand is higher than the supply capacity. We prove that every electricity division problem can be solved by k-times bin-packing for some finite k. We also show that k-times bin-packing can be used to distribute the electricity in a fair and efficient way. Particularly, we implement generalizations of the First-Fit and First-Fit Decreasing bin-packing algorithms to solve kBP, and apply the generalizations to real electricity demand data. We show that our generalizations outperform existing heuristic solutions to the same problem. Due to space constraints, several parts of the paper were moved to appendices. All appendices are available in the full version [1].

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationAlgorithmic Game Theory - 17th International Symposium, SAGT 2024, Proceedings
EditorsGuido Schäfer, Carmine Ventre
PublisherSpringer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
Pages483-500
Number of pages18
ISBN (Print)9783031710322
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event17th International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory, SAGT 2024 - Amsterdam, Netherlands
Duration: 3 Sep 20246 Sep 2024

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume15156 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference17th International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory, SAGT 2024
Country/TerritoryNetherlands
CityAmsterdam
Period3/09/246/09/24

Keywords

  • Approximation algorithms
  • bin-packing
  • egalitarian metric
  • electricity distribution
  • fair division
  • Fernandez de la Vega-Lueker algorithm
  • First-Fit
  • First-Fit Decreasing
  • Karmarkar-Karp algorithms
  • Next-Fit
  • utilitarian metric
  • utility difference

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