Maintaining Matroid Intersections Online

Maintaining a maximum bipartite matching online while minimizing recourse/augmentations is a well studied problem, motivated by content delivery, job scheduling, and hashing. A breakthrough result of Bernstein, Holm, and Rotenberg (SODA 2018 ) resolved this problem up to a logarithmic factors. However, we may need a richer class of combinatorial constraints (e.g., matroid constraints) to model other problems in scheduling and resource allocation.

We consider the problem of maintaining a maximum independent set of an arbitrary matroid M and a partition matroid P in the online setting. Specifically, at each timestep t one part P t of the partition matroid (i.e., a subset of elements) is revealed: we must now select at most one of these newly-revealed elements, but can exchange some of the previously selected elements for new ones from previous parts, to maintain a maximum independent set on the elements seen thus far. The goal is to minimize the number of augmentations/changes done by our algorithm. If M is also a partition matroid, we recover the problem of maintaining a maximum bipartite matching online with recourse as a special case. In our work, we allow arbitrary matroids M, and so we can model broader classes of problems.

Our main result is an O(n log 2 n)-competitive algorithm, where n is the rank of the largest common base; this matches the current best quantitative bound for the bipartite matching special case. Our result builds substantively on the breakthrough result of Bernstein, Holm, and Rotenberg for maintaining bipartite matchings: a key contribution of our work is to make connections to market equilibria and prices, and our use of properties of these equilibria in submodular utility allocation markets to prove our bound on the number of augmentations.