982 research outputs found
Low-Degree Spanning Trees of Small Weight
The degree-d spanning tree problem asks for a minimum-weight spanning tree in
which the degree of each vertex is at most d. When d=2 the problem is TSP, and
in this case, the well-known Christofides algorithm provides a
1.5-approximation algorithm (assuming the edge weights satisfy the triangle
inequality).
In 1984, Christos Papadimitriou and Umesh Vazirani posed the challenge of
finding an algorithm with performance guarantee less than 2 for Euclidean
graphs (points in R^n) and d > 2. This paper gives the first answer to that
challenge, presenting an algorithm to compute a degree-3 spanning tree of cost
at most 5/3 times the MST. For points in the plane, the ratio improves to 3/2
and the algorithm can also find a degree-4 spanning tree of cost at most 5/4
times the MST.Comment: conference version in Symposium on Theory of Computing (1994
Network Optimization on Partitioned Pairs of Points
Given n pairs of points, S = {{p_1, q_1}, {p_2, q_2}, ..., {p_n, q_n}}, in some metric space, we study the problem of two-coloring the points within each pair, red and blue, to optimize the cost of a pair of node-disjoint networks, one over the red points and one over the blue points. In this paper we consider our network structures to be spanning trees, traveling salesman tours or matchings. We consider several different weight functions computed over the network structures induced, as well as several different objective functions. We show that some of these problems are NP-hard, and provide constant factor approximation algorithms in all cases
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