| The fundamental concept of resource allocation--assigning resources to tasks, and so on--gives rise to very broad families of problems, with instances in many domains, applications, disciplines. In the proposed thesis, we will study a series of assignment-oriented resource allocation problems modeling realworld situations, from the point of view of online and approximation algorithms. The complexities and character of these problems vary greatly. Separate from the problem definitions, we will also examine how the difficulty changes as we vary modalities such as online v. offline, distributed v. centralized, linear v. poly-time, thus mapping out a lattice of problem settings. For each problem and setting, we seek efficient algorithms of the appropriate kind (e.g., exact, approximation, competitive, distributed, ...). Three classes of problems examined in particular will be sensor-mission matching, battery charge scheduling, and geometric sensor coverage. |
