Flip Distance Between Triangulations of a Planar Point Set is APX-Hard

In this work we consider triangulations of point sets in the Euclidean plane, i.e., maximal straight-line crossing-free graphs on a finite set of points. Given a triangulation of a point set, an edge flip is the operation of removing one edge and adding another one, such that the resulting graph is again a triangulation. Flips are a major way of locally transforming triangular meshes. We show that, given a point set $S$ in the Euclidean plane and two triangulations $T_1$ and $T_2$ of $S$, it is an APX-hard problem to minimize the number of edge flips to transform $T_1$ to $T_2$.Comment: A previous version only showed NP-completeness of the corresponding decision problem. The current version is the one of the accepted manuscrip

Scalable Exact Visualization of Isocontours in Road Networks via Minimum-Link Paths

Isocontours in road networks represent the area that is reachable from a source within a given resource limit. We study the problem of computing accurate isocontours in realistic, large-scale networks. We propose isocontours represented by polygons with minimum number of segments that separate reachable and unreachable components of the network. Since the resulting problem is not known to be solvable in polynomial time, we introduce several heuristics that run in (almost) linear time and are simple enough to be implemented in practice. A key ingredient is a new practical linear-time algorithm for minimum-link paths in simple polygons. Experiments in a challenging realistic setting show excellent performance of our algorithms in practice, computing near-optimal solutions in a few milliseconds on average, even for long ranges

Dilation, Transport, Visibility and Fault-Tolerant Algorithms

Connecting some points in the plane by a road network is equivalent to constructing a finite planar graph G whose vertex set contains a predefined set of vertices (i. e., the possible destinations in the road network). The dilation between two vertices p and q of graph G is defined as the Euclidean length of a shortest path in G from p to q, divided by the Euclidean distance from p to q. That is, given a point set P, the goal is to place some additional crossing vertices C such that there exists a planar graph G = (P ∪ C, E) whose dilation is small. Here, the dilation of G is defined as the maximum dilation between two vertices in G. We show that, except for some special point sets P, there is a lower bound Δ(P) > 1, depending on P, on the dilation of any finite graph containing P in its vertex set. The transportation problem is the problem of finding a transportation plan that minimizes the total transport cost. We are given a set of suppliers, and each supplier produces a fixed amount of some commodity, say, bread. Furthermore, there is a set of customers, and each customer has some demand of bread, such that the total demand equals the amount of bread the suppliers produce. The task is to assign each unit of bread produced to some customer, such that the total transportation cost becomes a minimum. A first idea is to assign each unit of bread to the client to which the transport cost of this unit is minimal. Clearly, this gives rise to a transportation plan which minimizes the total transportation cost. However, it is likely that not every customer will obtain the required amount of bread. Therefore, we need to use a different algorithm for distributing the supplier's bread. We show that if the bread produced by the suppliers is given by a continuous probability density function and the set of customers is discrete, then every optimal transport plan can be characterized by a unique additively weighted Voronoi diagram for the customers. When managing the construction process of a building by a digital model of the building, it is necessary to compute essential parts between walls of the building. Given two walls A and B, the essential part between A and B is the set of line segments s where one endpoint belongs to A, the other endpoint belongs to B, and s does not intersect A or B. We give an algorithm that computes, in linear time, the essential parts between A and B. Our algorithm is based on computing the visibility polygon of A and of B, and two shortest paths connecting points of A with points of B. We conclude the thesis by giving fault-tolerant algorithms for some fundamental geometric problems. We assume that a basic primitive operation used by an algorithm fails with some small probability p. Depending on the results of the primitive operations, it is possible that the algorithm will not work correctly. For example, one faulty comparison when executing a sorting algorithm can result in some numbers being placed far away from their true positions. An algorithm is called tolerant, if with high probability a good answer is given, if the error probability p is small. We provide tolerant algorithms that find the maximum of n numbers, search for a key in a sorted sequence of n keys, sort a set of n numbers, and solve Linear Programming in R2

IST Austria Thesis

This thesis considers two examples of reconfiguration problems: flipping edges in edge-labelled triangulations of planar point sets and swapping labelled tokens placed on vertices of a graph. In both cases the studied structures – all the triangulations of a given point set or all token placements on a given graph – can be thought of as vertices of the so-called reconfiguration graph, in which two vertices are adjacent if the corresponding structures differ by a single elementary operation – by a flip of a diagonal in a triangulation or by a swap of tokens on adjacent vertices, respectively. We study the reconfiguration of one instance of a structure into another via (shortest) paths in the reconfiguration graph. For triangulations of point sets in which each edge has a unique label and a flip transfers the label from the removed edge to the new edge, we prove a polynomial-time testable condition, called the Orbit Theorem, that characterizes when two triangulations of the same point set lie in the same connected component of the reconfiguration graph. The condition was first conjectured by Bose, Lubiw, Pathak and Verdonschot. We additionally provide a polynomial time algorithm that computes a reconfiguring flip sequence, if it exists. Our proof of the Orbit Theorem uses topological properties of a certain high-dimensional cell complex that has the usual reconfiguration graph as its 1-skeleton. In the context of token swapping on a tree graph, we make partial progress on the problem of finding shortest reconfiguration sequences. We disprove the so-called Happy Leaf Conjecture and demonstrate the importance of swapping tokens that are already placed at the correct vertices. We also prove that a generalization of the problem to weighted coloured token swapping is NP-hard on trees but solvable in polynomial time on paths and stars

Abstracts for the twentyfirst European workshop on Computational geometry, Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, The Netherlands, March 9-11, 2005

This volume contains abstracts of the papers presented at the 21st European Workshop on Computational Geometry, held at TU Eindhoven (the Netherlands) on March 9–11, 2005. There were 53 papers presented at the Workshop, covering a wide range of topics. This record number shows that the field of computational geometry is very much alive in Europe. We wish to thank all the authors who submitted papers and presented their work at the workshop. We believe that this has lead to a collection of very interesting abstracts that are both enjoyable and informative for the reader. Finally, we are grateful to TU Eindhoven for their support in organizing the workshop and to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) for sponsoring the workshop