On the power of lookahead in on-line server routing problems

We study the usefulness of lookahead in on-line server routing problems: if an on-line algorithm is not only informed about the requests released so far, but also has a limited ability to foresee future requests, what is the improvement that can be achieved in terms of the competitive ratio? We consider several on-line server routing problems in this setting, such as the on-line traveling salesman and the on-line traveling repairman problem. We show that the influence of lookahead can change considerably depending on the particular objective function and metric space considered. © 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.