Exact algorithms for NP-hard problems: a survey

We discuss fast exponential time solutions for NP-complete problems. We survey known results and approaches, we provide pointers to the literature, and we discuss several open problems in this area. The list of discussed NP-complete problems includes the travelling salesman problem, scheduling under precedence constraints, satisfiability, knapsack, graph coloring, independent sets in graphs, bandwidth of a graph, and many more

Exploiting structure to cope with NP-hard graph problems: Polynomial and exponential time exact algorithms

An ideal algorithm for solving a particular problem always finds an optimal solution, finds such a solution for every possible instance, and finds it in polynomial time. When dealing with NP-hard problems, algorithms can only be expected to possess at most two out of these three desirable properties. All algorithms presented in this thesis are exact algorithms, which means that they always find an optimal solution. Demanding the solution to be optimal means that other concessions have to be made when designing an exact algorithm for an NP-hard problem: we either have to impose restrictions on the instances of the problem in order to achieve a polynomial time complexity, or we have to abandon the requirement that the worst-case running time has to be polynomial. In some cases, when the problem under consideration remains NP-hard on restricted input, we are even forced to do both. Most of the problems studied in this thesis deal with partitioning the vertex set of a given graph. In the other problems the task is to find certain types of paths and cycles in graphs. The problems all have in common that they are NP-hard on general graphs. We present several polynomial time algorithms for solving restrictions of these problems to specific graph classes, in particular graphs without long induced paths, chordal graphs and claw-free graphs. For problems that remain NP-hard even on restricted input we present exact exponential time algorithms. In the design of each of our algorithms, structural graph properties have been heavily exploited. Apart from using existing structural results, we prove new structural properties of certain types of graphs in order to obtain our algorithmic results

Sublinear Algorithm And Lower Bound For Combinatorial Problems

As the scale of the problems we want to solve in real life becomes larger, the input sizes of the problems we want to solve could be much larger than the memory of a single computer. In these cases, the classical algorithms may no longer be feasible options, even when they run in linear time and linear space, as the input size is too large. In this thesis, we study various combinatorial problems in different computation models that process large input sizes using limited resources. In particular, we consider the query model, streaming model, and massively parallel computation model. In addition, we also study the tradeoffs between the adaptivity and performance of algorithms in these models.We first consider two graph problems, vertex coloring problem and metric traveling salesman problem (TSP). The main results are structure results for these problems, which give frameworks for achieving sublinear algorithms of these problems in different models. We also show that the sublinear algorithms for (∆ + 1)-coloring problem are tight. We then consider the graph sparsification problem, which is an important technique for designing sublinear algorithms. We give proof of the existence of a linear size hypergraph cut sparsifier, along with a polynomial algorithm that calculates one. We also consider sublinear algorithms for this problem in the streaming and query models. Finally, we study the round complexity of submodular function minimization (SFM). In particular, we give a polynomial lower bound on the number of rounds we need to compute s − t max flow - a special case of SFM - in the streaming model. We also prove a polynomial lower bound on the number of rounds we need to solve the general SFM problem in polynomial queries