Parking on a random tree

Christina Goldschmidt, Michal Przykucki

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)
174 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

Consider a uniform random rooted labelled tree on n vertices. We imagine that each node of the tree has space for a single car to park. A number m ≤ n of cars arrive one by one, each at a node chosen independently and uniformly at random. If a car arrives at a space which is already occupied, it follows the unique path towards the root until it encounters an empty space, in which case it parks there; if there is no empty space, it leaves the tree. Consider m = bαnc and let An,α denote the event that all bαnc cars find spaces in the tree. Lackner and Panholzer proved (via analytic combinatorics methods) that there is a phase transition in this model. Then if α ≤ 1/2, we have P (An,α) → √ 1−2α/1−α, whereas if α > 1/2 we have P (An,α) → 0. We give a probabilistic explanation for this phenomenon, and an alternative proof via the objective method. Along the way, we consider the following variant of the problem: take the tree to be the family tree of a Galton–Watson branching process with Poisson(1) offspring distribution, and let an independent Poisson(α) number of cars arrive at each vertex. Let X be the number of cars which visit the root of the tree. We show that E [X] undergoes a discontinuous phase transition, which turns out to be a generic phenomenon for arbitrary offspring distributions of mean at least 1 for the tree and arbitrary arrival distributions.
Original languageEnglish
Number of pages23
JournalCombinatorics, Probability and Computing
Early online date23 Oct 2018
DOIs
Publication statusE-pub ahead of print - 23 Oct 2018

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