Approximation algorithms for maximally balanced connected graph partition

Given a simple connected graph $G = (V, E)$, we seek to partition the vertex set $V$ into $k$ non-empty parts such that the subgraph induced by each part is connected, and the partition is maximally balanced in the way that the maximum cardinality of these $k$ parts is minimized. We refer this problem to as {\em min-max balanced connected graph partition} into $k$ parts and denote it as {\sc $k$-BGP}. The general vertex-weighted version of this problem on trees has been studied since about four decades ago, which admits a linear time exact algorithm; the vertex-weighted {\sc $2$-BGP} and {\sc $3$-BGP} admit a $5/4$-approximation and a $3/2$-approximation, respectively; but no approximability result exists for {\sc $k$-BGP} when $k \ge 4$, except a trivial $k$-approximation. In this paper, we present another $3/2$-approximation for our cardinality {\sc $3$-BGP} and then extend it to become a $k/2$-approximation for {\sc $k$-BGP}, for any constant $k \ge 3$. Furthermore, for {\sc $4$-BGP}, we propose an improved $24/13$-approximation. To these purposes, we have designed several local improvement operations, which could be useful for related graph partition problems.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures, accepted for presentation at COCOA 2019 (Xiamen, China

Approximation Algorithms for Minimum Tree Partition

We consider a problem of locating communication centers. In this problem, it is required to partition the set of n customers into subsets minimizing the length of nets required to connect all the customers to the communication centers. Suppose that communication centers are to be placed in p of the customers locations. The number of customers each center supports is also given. The problem remains to divide a graph into sets of the given sizes, keeping the sum of the spanning trees minimal. The problem is NP-Complete, and no polynomial algorithm with bounded error ratio can be given, unless P = NP . We present an approximation algorithm for the problem assuming that the edge lengths satisfy the triangle inequality. It runs in O(p 2 4 p +n 2 ) time (n = jV j) and comes within a factor of 2p \Gamma 1 of optimal. When the sets' sizes are all equal this algorithm runs in O(n 2 ) time. Next an improved algorithm is presented which obtains as an input a positive integer x (x n \Gamm..