JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 16(5): 676-685, doi: 10.3217/jucs-016-05-0676
The Tourist in the Shopping Arcade
expand article infoRudolf Fleischer‡, Tom Kamphans§, Rolf Klein|, Elmar Langetepe|, Gerhard Trippen
‡ Fudan University, Shanghai, China§ Braunschweig University of Technology, Braunschweig, Germany| University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany¶ University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

Corresponding author: Rudolf Fleischer ( rudolf@acm.org )

© Rudolf Fleischer, Tom Kamphans, Rolf Klein, Elmar Langetepe, Gerhard Trippen.
This article is freely available under the J.UCS Open Content License.
Citation: Fleischer R, Kamphans T, Klein R, Langetepe E, Trippen G (2010) The Tourist in the Shopping Arcade. JUCS - Journal of Universal Computer Science 16(5): 676-685. https://doi.org/10.3217/jucs-016-05-0676
Open Access
Abstract
A tourist is searching for a gift and moves along a shopping arcade until the desired object gets into sight. The location of the corresponding shop is not known in advance. Therefore in this on-line setting the tourist has to make a detour in comparison to an optimal off-line straight line path to the desired object. We can show that there is a strategy for the tourist, so that the path length is never greater than C* times the optimal off-line path length, where C* = 1.059401 . . . holds. Furthermore, there is no strategy that attains a competitive factor smaller than C*.
Keywords
computational geometry, on-line algorithms, on-line navigation