The Stochastic Single Node Service Provision Problem

The service provision problem described in this paper comes from an application of distributed processing in telecommunications networks. The objective is to maximize a service provider's profit from offering computational based services to customers. The service provider has limited capacity of some resources and therefore must choose from a set of software applications those he would like to offer. This can be done in a dynamic manner taking into consideration that demand for the different services is uncertain. This problem is examined in the framework of stochastic integer programming. We examine approximations and complexity for the case when demand is described by a discrete probability distribution and one resource limits the number of software applications that may be installed. For the general case a heuristic with a worst-case performance ratio that increases in the number of scenarios is presented. Restricting the class of problem instances in a way that many reasonable prac..