Online traveling salesman problem with deadlines and service flexibility

Considering the customer psychology while waiting to be served, we introduce a more reasonable form of deadlines into online traveling salesman problem (OL-TSP) with service flexibility. The salesman can choose whether to serve or not when a new request arrives. By rejecting the request or missing its deadline, penalties will be generated. The goal is to minimize server’s costs (travel makespan plus the penalties of missed requests). We show that no deterministic or randomized online algorithms can achieve constant competitive ratio for OL-TSP with deadlines and service flexibility on general metric space. While on constrained metric space (such as truncated line segment), we present lower bound, give an algorithm, and analyze the competitive ratio.