Leveraging Reusability: Improved Competitive Ratio of Greedy for Reusable Resources

We study online weighted bipartite matching of reusable resources where an adversarial sequence of requests for resources arrive over time. A resource that is matched is 'used' for a random duration, drawn independently from a resource-dependent distribution, after which it returns and is able to be matched again. We study the performance of the greedy policy, which matches requests to the resource that yields the highest reward. Previously, it was known that the greedy policy is 1/2 competitive against a clairvoyant benchmark that knows the request sequence in advance. In this work, we improve this result by introducing a parameter that quantifies the degree of reusability of the resources. Specifically, if p represents the smallest probability over the usage distributions that a matched resource returns in one time step, the greedy policy achieves a competitive ratio of $1/(2-p)$. Furthermore, when the usage distributions are geometric, we establish a stronger competitive ratio of $(1+p)/2$, which we demonstrate to be tight. Both of these results align with the known results in the two extreme scenarios: p = 0 corresponds to non-reusable resources, where 1/2 is known to be tight, while p = 1 corresponds to every resource returning immediately, where greedy is the optimal policy and hence the competitive ratio is 1. Finally, we show that both results are robust to approximations of the greedy policy. Our work demonstrates that the reusability of resources can enhance performance compared to the non-reusable setting, and that a simple greedy policy suffices when the degree of reusability is high. Our insights contribute to the understanding of how resource reusability can influence the performance of online algorithms, and highlight the potential for improved performance as the degree of reusability increases.