Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-ndw9j Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T09:44:57.282Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

The Move-to-Front Rule for Multiple Lists

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2009

Costas Courcoubetis
Affiliation:
AT&T Bell Laboratories 600 Mountain Avenue Murray Hill, New Jersey 07974
Richard R. Weber
Affiliation:
Cambridge University, Engineering Department Management Studies Group Mill Lane, Cambridge, CB2 1RX, United Kingdom

Extract

A number of data items (1,2,…,n) are to be maintained in a structure which consists of several linear lists. Successive requests to access items are independent random variables, and the probability that a particular request is for item i is pi. The cost of accessing the jth item from the front of a list is j. For a single list, the move-to-front rule (MF) has been extensively studied and has been shown to provide good performance. In some actual circumstances, MF is the only physically realizable or convenient policy. We extend the study of move-to-front by examining the case where items are kept in several lists. Following its access, an item must be replaced at the front of one of the lists. In certain cases, assuming the pi's are known, the policy which minimizes the average retrieval cost takes a particularly simple form: no item is ever moved from the list in which it is placed initially.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Anderson, E.J., Nash, P., & Weber, R.R. (1982). A counterexample to a conjecture on optimal list ordering. Journal of Applied Probability 19: 730732.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bentley, L.J. & McGeoch, C. (1983). Worst-case analysis of self-organizing sequential search heuristics. In Proceedings of the 20th Allerton Conference on Communications, Control, and Computing. University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Illinois, 10 6–8, 1982, pp. 452461.Google Scholar
Rivest, R. (1976). On self-organizing sequential search heuristics. Communication of the ACM 19: 6367.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sleator, D.D. & Tarjan, R.E. (1985). Amortized efficiency of list update and paging rules. Communication of the ACM 28: 202208.CrossRefGoogle Scholar