No Arabic abstract
The Euclidean TSP with neighborhoods (TSPN) problem seeks a shortest tour that visits a given collection of $n$ regions ({em neighborhoods}). We present the first polynomial-time approximation scheme for TSPN for a set of regions given by arbitrary disjoint fat regions in the plane. This improves substantially upon the known approximation algorithms, and is the first PTAS for TSPN on regions of non-comparable sizes. Our result is based on a novel extension of the $m$-guillotine method. The result applies to regions that are fat in a very weak sense: each region $P_i$ has area $Omega([diam(P_i)]^2)$, but is otherwise arbitrary.
In the Euclidean TSP with neighborhoods (TSPN), we are given a collection of n regions (neighborhoods) and we seek a shortest tour that visits each region. As a generalization of the classical Euclidean TSP, TSPN is also NP-hard. In this paper, we present new approximation results for the TSPN, including (1) a constant-factor approximation algorithm for the case of arbitrary connected neighborhoods having comparable diameters; and (2) a PTAS for the important special case of disjoint unit disk neighborhoods (or nearly disjoint, nearly-unit disks). Our methods also yield improved approximation ratios for various special classes of neighborhoods, which have previously been studied. Further, we give a linear-time O(1)-approximation algorithm for the case of neighborhoods that are (infinite) straight lines.
Given a set of pairwise disjoint polygonal obstacles in the plane, finding an obstacle-avoiding Euclidean shortest path between two points is a classical problem in computational geometry and has been studied extensively. The previous best algorithm was given by Hershberger and Suri [FOCS 1993, SIAM J. Comput. 1999] and the algorithm runs in $O(nlog n)$ time and $O(nlog n)$ space, where $n$ is the total number of vertices of all obstacles. The algorithm is time-optimal because $Omega(nlog n)$ is a lower bound. It has been an open problem for over two decades whether the space can be reduced to $O(n)$. In this paper, we settle it by solving the problem in $O(nlog n)$ time and $O(n)$ space, which is optimal in both time and space; we achieve this by modifying the algorithm of Hershberger and Suri. Like their original algorithm, our new algorithm can build a shortest path map for a source point $s$ in $O(nlog n)$ time and $O(n)$ space, such that given any query point $t$, the length of a shortest path from $s$ to $t$ can be computed in $O(log n)$ time and a shortest path can be produced in additional time linear in the number of edges of the path.
In this paper we study a natural special case of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) with point-locational-uncertainty which we will call the {em adversarial TSP} problem (ATSP). Given a metric space $(X, d)$ and a set of subsets $R = {R_1, R_2, ... , R_n} : R_i subseteq X$, the goal is to devise an ordering of the regions, $sigma_R$, that the tour will visit such that when a single point is chosen from each region, the induced tour over those points in the ordering prescribed by $sigma_R$ is as short as possible. Unlike the classical locational-uncertainty-TSP problem, which focuses on minimizing the expected length of such a tour when the point within each region is chosen according to some probability distribution, here, we focus on the {em adversarial model} in which once the choice of $sigma_R$ is announced, an adversary selects a point from each region in order to make the resulting tour as long as possible. In other words, we consider an offline problem in which the goal is to determine an ordering of the regions $R$ that is optimal with respect to the worst point possible within each region being chosen by an adversary, who knows the chosen ordering. We give a $3$-approximation when $R$ is a set of arbitrary regions/sets of points in a metric space. We show how geometry leads to improved constant factor approximations when regions are parallel line segments of the same lengths, and a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the important special case in which $R$ is a set of disjoint unit disks in the plane.
We consider the problem of partitioning the set of vertices of a given unit disk graph (UDG) into a minimum number of cliques. The problem is NP-hard and various constant factor approximations are known, with the current best ratio of 3. Our main result is a {em weakly robust} polynomial time approximation scheme (PTAS) for UDGs expressed with edge-lengths, it either (i) computes a clique partition or (ii) gives a certificate that the graph is not a UDG; for the case (i) that it computes a clique partition, we show that it is guaranteed to be within $(1+eps)$ ratio of the optimum if the input is UDG; however if the input is not a UDG it either computes a clique partition as in case (i) with no guarantee on the quality of the clique partition or detects that it is not a UDG. Noting that recognition of UDGs is NP-hard even if we are given edge lengths, our PTAS is a weakly-robust algorithm. Our algorithm can be transformed into an $O(frac{log^* n}{eps^{O(1)}})$ time distributed PTAS. We consider a weighted version of the clique partition problem on vertex weighted UDGs that generalizes the problem. We note some key distinctions with the unweighted version, where ideas useful in obtaining a PTAS breakdown. Yet, surprisingly, it admits a $(2+eps)$-approximation algorithm for the weighted case where the graph is expressed, say, as an adjacency matrix. This improves on the best known 8-approximation for the {em unweighted} case for UDGs expressed in standard form.
In this extended abstract, we present a PTAS for guarding the vertices of a weakly-visible polygon $P$ from a subset of its vertices, or in other words, a PTAS for computing a minimum dominating set of the visibility graph of the vertices of $P$. We then show how to obtain a PTAS for vertex guarding $P$s boundary.