5 research outputs found
A Comparison of Local Search Methods for the Multicriteria Police Districting Problem on Graph
In the current economic climate, law enforcement agencies are facing resource shortages. The effective and efficient use of scarce resources is therefore of the utmost importance to provide a high standard public safety service. Optimization models specifically tailored to the necessity of police agencies can help to ameliorate their use. The Multicriteria Police Districting Problem (MC-PDP) on a graph concerns the definition of sound patrolling sectors in a police district. The objective of this problem is to partition a graph into convex and continuous subsets, while ensuring efficiency and workload balance among the subsets. The model was originally formulated in collaboration with the Spanish National Police Corps. We propose for its solution three local search algorithms: a Simple Hill Climbing, a Steepest Descent Hill Climbing, and a Tabu Search. To improve their diversification capabilities, all the algorithms implement a multistart procedure, initialized by randomized greedy solutions. The algorithms are empirically tested on a case study on the Central District of Madrid. Our experiments show that the solutions identified by the novel Tabu Search outperform the other algorithms. Finally, research guidelines for future developments on the MC-PDP are given
Finding all Convex Cuts of a Plane Graph in Polynomial Time
Convexity is a notion that has been defined for subsets of \RR^n and for
subsets of general graphs. A convex cut of a graph is a
-partition such that both and are convex,
\ie shortest paths between vertices in never leave , . Finding convex cuts is -hard for general graphs. To
characterize convex cuts, we employ the Djokovic relation, a reflexive and
symmetric relation on the edges of a graph that is based on shortest paths
between the edges' end vertices.
It is known for a long time that, if is bipartite and the Djokovic
relation is transitive on , \ie is a partial cube, then the cut-sets of
's convex cuts are precisely the equivalence classes of the Djokovic
relation. In particular, any edge of is contained in the cut-set of exactly
one convex cut. We first characterize a class of plane graphs that we call {\em
well-arranged}. These graphs are not necessarily partial cubes, but any edge of
a well-arranged graph is contained in the cut-set(s) of at least one convex
cut. We also present an algorithm that uses the Djokovic relation for computing
all convex cuts of a (not necessarily plane) bipartite graph in \bigO(|E|^3)
time. Specifically, a cut-set is the cut-set of a convex cut if and only if the
Djokovic relation holds for any pair of edges in the cut-set.
We then characterize the cut-sets of the convex cuts of a general graph
using two binary relations on edges: (i) the Djokovic relation on the edges of
a subdivision of , where any edge of is subdivided into exactly two
edges and (ii) a relation on the edges of itself that is not the Djokovic
relation. Finally, we use this characterization to present the first algorithm
for finding all convex cuts of a plane graph in polynomial time.Comment: 23 pages. Submitted to Journal of Discrete Algorithms (JDA