On-Line Distribution System of Trial-Sale Production and its Competitive Algorithms

In this paper, a distribution system consisting of a single manufacture and many geographically dispersed agents is studied. The manufacture distributes the trial-sale productions to many agents in an online fashion. Namely, without any information in the future, the manufacture will determine how many goods would be transported to the agents during every step. The goal is to minimize total transportation costs. The Greedy Strategy and the Balance Strategy are proposed respectively, and some results are obtained. Furthermore, the degenerated problem P1 of this problem is analyzed. Finally, we compare these two strategies and achieve some results.