You are consulting for a trucking company that does a large amount of business ship- ping packages between New York and Boston. The volume is high enough that they have to send a number of trucks each day between the two locations. Trucks have a xed limit W on the maximum amount of weight they are allowed to carry. Boxes arrive at the New York station one by one, and each package i has a weight wi. The trucking station is quite small, so at most one truck can be at the station at any time. Company policy requires that boxes are shipped in the order they arrive; otherwise, a customer might get upset upon seeing a box that arrived after his make it to Boston faster. At the moment, the company is using a simple greedy algorithm for packing: they pack boxes in the order they arrive, and whenever the next box does not t, they send the truck on its way.
But they wonder if they night be using too many trucks, and they want your opinion on whether the situation can be improved. Here is how they are thinking. Maybe one could decrease the number of trucks needed by sometimes sending o a truck that was less full, and in this way allow the next few trucks to be better packed.
Prove that, for a given set of boxes with speci ed weights, the greedy algorithm cur- rently in use actually minimizes the number of trucks that are needed. Your proof should follow the type of analysis we used for the Interval Scheduling Problem: it should establish the optimality of this greedy packing algorithm by identifying a mea- sure under which it “stays ahead” of all other solutions.