Searcharxiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 1802.02744

Minimizing Latency in Online Ride and Delivery Services

Abhimanyu Das·Sreenivas Gollapudi·Anthony Kim·Debmalya Panigrahi·Chaitanya Swamy
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Motivated by the popularity of online ride and delivery services, we study natural variants of classical multi-vehicle minimum latency problems where the objective is to route a set of vehicles located at depots to serve request located on a metric space so as to minimize the total latency. In this paper, we consider point-to-point requests that come with source-destination pairs and release-time constraints that restrict when each request can be served. The point-to-point requests and release-time constraints model taxi rides and deliveries. For all the variants considered, we show constant-factor approximation algorithms based on a linear programming framework. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first set of results for the aforementioned variants of the minimum latency problems. Furthermore, we provide an empirical study of heuristics based on our theoretical algorithms on a real data set of taxi rides.

Explore related subjects

cs.DS

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Abhimanyu Das, Sreenivas Gollapudi, Anthony Kim, Debmalya Panigrahi, Chaitanya Swamy. 2018-02-08. Minimizing Latency in Online Ride and Delivery Services. https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.02744

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Quasi-Monte Carlo Beyond Hardy-Krause II: $(1 + \varepsilon)n$ Samples Suffice

Numerical integration studies how well one can estimate the integral of a function $f$ over $[0,1)^d$ using $n$ sample points. The two classical methods, Monte Carlo (MC) and quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC), have complementary strengths and weaknesses, and a fundamental question is to design an approach that combines the benefits of both. Recently, building on the transference principle in discrepancy theory, Bansal and Jiang~\cite{BJ25a} gave a randomized QMC method that bridges MC and QMC guarantees using only i.i.d.\ samples. Their method also goes beyond the classical Koksma--Hlawka inequality: it achieves integration error $\widetilde{O}_d(\sigma_{\mathsf{SO}}(f)/n)$, where the smoothed-out variation $\sigma_{\mathsf{SO}}(f)$ can be substantially smaller than the Hardy--Krause variation that governs the classical bound. However, their algorithm requires $n^2$ i.i.d.\ samples as input, and this quadratic blowup is inherent to any method based on the transference principle. In this work, we bypass the quadratic blowup: for any constant $\varepsilon > 0$, we show that $(1+\varepsilon)n$ i.i.d.\ samples suffice to both obtain the beyond-Hardy--Krause guarantee of~\cite{BJ25a}, resolving an open problem posed there, and to produce low-discrepancy point sequences. Our algorithms are variants of the online Haar-thinning method of Dwivedi, Feldheim, Gurel-Gurevich, and Ramdas~\cite{DFG+19}.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2026

Single-Exponential Algorithms and a Polynomial Kernel for Strong Connectivity Augmentation

Strong Connectivity Augmentation (SCA) asks whether a directed acyclic graph can be made strongly connected by adding at most $k$ prescribed links whose total weight is within a given budget. Klinkby, Misra, and Saurabh (SODA 2021) gave an $O^*(2^{O(k\log k)})$-time algorithm and asked whether the problem admits a single-exponential parameterized algorithm and a polynomial kernel. We answer both questions affirmatively: SCA can be solved in $O^*(9^k)$ time and admits a polynomial kernel with $O(k^4)$ vertices and $O(k^{16})$ bits. For unweighted SCA, we obtain $O^*(4^k)$ time and a kernel with $O(k^3)$ vertices. Our algorithms are based on a particularly simple reduction to Strongly Connected Spanning Subgraph with two edge costs.

cs.DS↗