938 research outputs found
3/2 Firefighters are not enough
The firefighter problem is a monotone dynamic process in graphs that can be
viewed as modeling the use of a limited supply of vaccinations to stop the
spread of an epidemic. In more detail, a fire spreads through a graph, from
burning vertices to their unprotected neighbors. In every round, a small amount
of unburnt vertices can be protected by firefighters. How many firefighters per
turn, on average, are needed to stop the fire from advancing? We prove tight
lower and upper bounds on the amount of firefighters needed to control a fire
in the Cartesian planar grid and in the strong planar grid, resolving two
conjectures of Ng and Raff.Comment: 8 page
The Non-Uniform k-Center Problem
In this paper, we introduce and study the Non-Uniform k-Center problem
(NUkC). Given a finite metric space and a collection of balls of radii
, the NUkC problem is to find a placement of their
centers on the metric space and find the minimum dilation , such that
the union of balls of radius around the th center covers
all the points in . This problem naturally arises as a min-max vehicle
routing problem with fleets of different speeds.
The NUkC problem generalizes the classic -center problem when all the
radii are the same (which can be assumed to be after scaling). It also
generalizes the -center with outliers (kCwO) problem when there are
balls of radius and balls of radius . There are -approximation
and -approximation algorithms known for these problems respectively; the
former is best possible unless P=NP and the latter remains unimproved for 15
years.
We first observe that no -approximation is to the optimal dilation is
possible unless P=NP, implying that the NUkC problem is more non-trivial than
the above two problems. Our main algorithmic result is an
-bi-criteria approximation result: we give an -approximation
to the optimal dilation, however, we may open centers of each
radii. Our techniques also allow us to prove a simple (uni-criteria), optimal
-approximation to the kCwO problem improving upon the long-standing
-factor. Our main technical contribution is a connection between the NUkC
problem and the so-called firefighter problems on trees which have been studied
recently in the TCS community.Comment: Adjusted the figur
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