Expected Cost of Greedy Online Facility Assignment on Regular Polygons (v3)

TL;DR

This paper analyzes a greedy online facility assignment process on regular polygons, deriving an exact value-function recurrence, exploiting symmetry for efficient computation, and studying how expected costs grow with the number of polygon vertices.

Contribution

It introduces an exact value-function characterization for the online assignment problem on regular polygons, utilizing symmetry reduction and numerical methods for evaluation.

Findings

Expected total cost increases with the number of vertices.

Per-customer travel distance grows gradually as remaining free vertices increase.

Recurrence validation through closed-form checks for the square.

Abstract

We study a greedy online facility assignment process on a regular $n$-gon, where unit-capacity facilities occupy the vertices and customers arrive sequentially at uniformly random locations on polygon edges. Each arrival is irrevocably assigned to the nearest currently free facility under the shortest edge-walk metric, with uniform tie-breaking among equidistant choices. Our main theoretical result is an exact value-function characterization: for every occupancy state $S\subseteq V$, the expected remaining cost $V(S)$ satisfies a finite-horizon integral recurrence obtained by conditioning on the random arrival edge and position. To make this recurrence computationally effective, we exploit dihedral symmetry of the regular polygon and show that $V(S)$ is invariant under rotations and reflections, enabling canonicalization and symmetry-reduced dynamic programming. For small $n$, we evaluate the recurrence accurately using deterministic numerical integration over piecewise-linear distance regions,; for larger $n$, we estimate the expected total cost via direct Monte Carlo simulation of the online process and report $95\%$ confidence intervals. Our computations validate the recurrence (including a closed-form check for the square, $n=4$) and indicate that the total expected cost increases with $n$, while the per-customer expected travel distance grows gradually as remaining free vertices become farther on average. \keywords{Online algorithms \and Facility assignment \and Expected cost \and Regular polygons \and Symmetry reduction \and Monte Carlo}