Dynamic Placement of Records in Linear Storage

Abstract

This paper considers allocation of space in a hnear storage medium when space must be allocated dynamically as customers arrive A heuristic is proposed for this problem and for a simple model of the resultmg reference sequence, we show that the average distance between consecutive references is asymptotically 7n/30, where n is the size of the storage For optimal static placement where one waits for all arrivals before any space allocation, the average distance is shown to be asymptotically 7n/30 For random placement, the average distance is asymptotically n/3 Thus, the heuristic is asymptotically optimal in a strong sense For reasonable values of n, we demonstrate that the heuristic is nearly as good as optimal static placement and much better than random placement. © 1978, ACM. All rights reserved.