1,569 research outputs found
Maximum Scatter TSP in Doubling Metrics
We study the problem of finding a tour of points in which every edge is
long. More precisely, we wish to find a tour that visits every point exactly
once, maximizing the length of the shortest edge in the tour. The problem is
known as Maximum Scatter TSP, and was introduced by Arkin et al. (SODA 1997),
motivated by applications in manufacturing and medical imaging. Arkin et al.
gave a -approximation for the metric version of the problem and showed
that this is the best possible ratio achievable in polynomial time (assuming ). Arkin et al. raised the question of whether a better approximation
ratio can be obtained in the Euclidean plane.
We answer this question in the affirmative in a more general setting, by
giving a -approximation algorithm for -dimensional doubling
metrics, with running time , where . As a corollary we obtain (i) an
efficient polynomial-time approximation scheme (EPTAS) for all constant
dimensions , (ii) a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for
dimension , for a sufficiently large constant , and (iii)
a PTAS for constant and . Furthermore, we
show the dependence on in our approximation scheme to be essentially
optimal, unless Satisfiability can be solved in subexponential time
Fine-Grained Complexity Analysis of Two Classic TSP Variants
We analyze two classic variants of the Traveling Salesman Problem using the
toolkit of fine-grained complexity. Our first set of results is motivated by
the Bitonic TSP problem: given a set of points in the plane, compute a
shortest tour consisting of two monotone chains. It is a classic
dynamic-programming exercise to solve this problem in time. While the
near-quadratic dependency of similar dynamic programs for Longest Common
Subsequence and Discrete Frechet Distance has recently been proven to be
essentially optimal under the Strong Exponential Time Hypothesis, we show that
bitonic tours can be found in subquadratic time. More precisely, we present an
algorithm that solves bitonic TSP in time and its bottleneck
version in time. Our second set of results concerns the popular
-OPT heuristic for TSP in the graph setting. More precisely, we study the
-OPT decision problem, which asks whether a given tour can be improved by a
-OPT move that replaces edges in the tour by new edges. A simple
algorithm solves -OPT in time for fixed . For 2-OPT, this is
easily seen to be optimal. For we prove that an algorithm with a runtime
of the form exists if and only if All-Pairs
Shortest Paths in weighted digraphs has such an algorithm. The results for
may suggest that the actual time complexity of -OPT is
. We show that this is not the case, by presenting an algorithm
that finds the best -move in time for
fixed . This implies that 4-OPT can be solved in time,
matching the best-known algorithm for 3-OPT. Finally, we show how to beat the
quadratic barrier for in two important settings, namely for points in the
plane and when we want to solve 2-OPT repeatedly.Comment: Extended abstract appears in the Proceedings of the 43rd
International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2016
The Traveling Salesman Problem Under Squared Euclidean Distances
Let be a set of points in , and let be a
real number. We define the distance between two points as
, where denotes the standard Euclidean distance between
and . We denote the traveling salesman problem under this distance
function by TSP(). We design a 5-approximation algorithm for TSP(2,2)
and generalize this result to obtain an approximation factor of
for and all .
We also study the variant Rev-TSP of the problem where the traveling salesman
is allowed to revisit points. We present a polynomial-time approximation scheme
for Rev-TSP with , and we show that Rev-TSP is APX-hard if and . The APX-hardness proof carries
over to TSP for the same parameter ranges.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures. (v2) Minor linguistic change
Approximating the Held-Karp Bound for Metric TSP in Nearly Linear Time
We give a nearly linear time randomized approximation scheme for the
Held-Karp bound [Held and Karp, 1970] for metric TSP. Formally, given an
undirected edge-weighted graph on edges and , the
algorithm outputs in time, with high probability, a
-approximation to the Held-Karp bound on the metric TSP instance
induced by the shortest path metric on . The algorithm can also be used to
output a corresponding solution to the Subtour Elimination LP. We substantially
improve upon the running time achieved previously
by Garg and Khandekar. The LP solution can be used to obtain a fast randomized
-approximation for metric TSP which improves
upon the running time of previous implementations of Christofides' algorithm
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
- …