The near exact bin covering problem

We present a new generalization of the bin covering problem that is known to be a strongly NP-hard problem. In our generalization there is a positive constant $Δ$, and we are given a set of items each of which has a positive size. We would like to find a partition of the items into bins. We say that a bin is near exact covered if the total size of items packed into the bin is between $1$ and $1+Δ$. Our goal is to maximize the number of near exact covered bins. If $Δ=0$ or $Δ>0$ is given as part of the input, our problem is shown here to have no approximation algorithm with a bounded asymptotic approximation ratio (assuming that $P\neq NP$). However, for the case where $Δ>0$ is seen as a constant, we present an asymptotic fully polynomial time approximation scheme (AFPTAS) that is our main contribution.

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