Edge Weighted Online Windowed Matching

Abstract

Motivated by applications from ride-sharing and kidney exchange, we study the problem of matching agents who arrive at a marketplace over time and leave after d time periods. Agents can only be matched while they are present in the marketplace. Each pair of agents can yield a different match value, and the planner's goal is to maximize the total value over a finite time horizon. First we study the case in which vertices arrive in an adversarial order. We provide a randomized 1/4-competitive algorithm building on a result by Feldman et al. [14] and Lehmann et al. [23]. We extend the model to the case in which departure times are drawn independently from a distribution with non-decreasing hazard rate, for which we establish a 1/8-competitive algorithm. When the arrival order is chosen uniformly at random, we show that a batching algorithm, which computes a maximum-weighted matching every (d+1) periods, is $0.279$-competitive.