Making Octants Colorful and Related Covering Decomposition Problems

We give new positive results on the long-standing open problem of geometric covering decomposition for homothetic polygons. In particular, we prove that for any positive integer k, every finite set of points in R^3 can be colored with k colors so that every translate of the negative octant containing at least k^6 points contains at least one of each color. The best previously known bound was doubly exponential in k. This yields, among other corollaries, the first polynomial bound for the decomposability of multiple coverings by homothetic triangles. We also investigate related decomposition problems involving intervals appearing on a line. We prove that no algorithm can dynamically maintain a decomposition of a multiple covering by intervals under insertion of new intervals, even in a semi-online model, in which some coloring decisions can be delayed. This implies that a wide range of sweeping plane algorithms cannot guarantee any bound even for special cases of the octant problem.Comment: version after revision process; minor changes in the expositio

Fully-Dynamic and Kinetic Conflict-Free Coloring of Intervals with Respect to Points

We introduce the fully-dynamic conflict-free coloring problem for a set S of intervals in R^1 with respect to points, where the goal is to maintain a conflict-free coloring for S under insertions and deletions. A coloring is conflict-free if for each point p contained in some interval, p is contained in an interval whose color is not shared with any other interval containing p. We investigate trade-offs between the number of colors used and the number of intervals that are recolored upon insertion or deletion of an interval. Our results include: - a lower bound on the number of recolorings as a function of the number of colors, which implies that with O(1) recolorings per update the worst-case number of colors is Omega(log n/log log n), and that any strategy using O(1/epsilon) colors needs Omega(epsilon n^epsilon) recolorings; - a coloring strategy that uses O(log n) colors at the cost of O(log n) recolorings, and another strategy that uses O(1/epsilon) colors at the cost of O(n^epsilon/epsilon) recolorings; - stronger upper and lower bounds for special cases. We also consider the kinetic setting where the intervals move continuously (but there are no insertions or deletions); here we show how to maintain a coloring with only four colors at the cost of three recolorings per event and show this is tight

Approximation and online algorithms in scheduling and coloring

In the last three decades, approximation and online algorithms have become a major area of theoretical computer science and discrete mathematics. Scheduling and coloring problems are among the most popular ones for which approximation and online algorithms have been analyzed. On one hand, motivated by the well-known difficulty to obtain good lower bounds for the problems, it is particularly hard to prove results on the online and offline performance of algorithms. On the other hand, the theoretically oriented studies of approximation and online algorithms for scheduling and coloring have also impact on the development of better algorithms for real world applications. In the thesis we present approximation algorithms and online algorithms for a number of scheduling and labeling (coloring) problems. Our work in the first part of the thesis is devoted to scheduling problems with the average weighted completion time objective function, that is primarily motivated by some theoretical questions which were open for a number of recent years. Here we present a general method which leads to the design of polynomial time approximation schemes (PTASs), best possible approximation results. In contrast, our work in the second part of the thesis is motivated by practical applications. We consider a number of new labeling and scheduling problems which occur in the design of communication networks. Here we present and analyze efficient approximation and online algorithms. We use very simple techniques which do not require large computational resources

LIPIcs, Volume 258, SoCG 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 258, SoCG 2023, Complete Volum

LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 274, ESA 2023, Complete Volum