clever or smart: Strategies for the online target date assignment problem

In this paper, we consider the Online Target Date Assignment Problem (OnlineTDAP) for general downstream problems, where the downstream cost are nonnegative, additive and satisfy the triangle inequality. We analyze algorithm smart, which was introduced by Angelelli et al. [3] and give its exact competitive ratio depending on the number of requests. Since the obtained competitive ratio is at most 22-1~1.8284 we answer the question posed in Angelelli et al. [4] if smart has a competitive ratio strictly less than 2. Moreover, we introduce a new algorithm called clever and show that this strategy has a competitive ratio of 3/2. We show that this is asymptotically optimal by proving that no online algorithm can perform better than 3/2-@e.