1,981 research outputs found
How the structure of precedence constraints may change the complexity class of scheduling problems
This survey aims at demonstrating that the structure of precedence
constraints plays a tremendous role on the complexity of scheduling problems.
Indeed many problems can be NP-hard when considering general precedence
constraints, while they become polynomially solvable for particular precedence
constraints. We also show that there still are many very exciting challenges in
this research area
The Parameterised Complexity of List Problems on Graphs of Bounded Treewidth
We consider the parameterised complexity of several list problems on graphs,
with parameter treewidth or pathwidth. In particular, we show that List Edge
Chromatic Number and List Total Chromatic Number are fixed parameter tractable,
parameterised by treewidth, whereas List Hamilton Path is W[1]-hard, even
parameterised by pathwidth. These results resolve two open questions of
Fellows, Fomin, Lokshtanov, Rosamond, Saurabh, Szeider and Thomassen (2011).Comment: Author final version, to appear in Information and Computation.
Changes from previous version include improved literature references and
restructured proof in Section
Fully polynomial FPT algorithms for some classes of bounded clique-width graphs
Parameterized complexity theory has enabled a refined classification of the
difficulty of NP-hard optimization problems on graphs with respect to key
structural properties, and so to a better understanding of their true
difficulties. More recently, hardness results for problems in P were achieved
using reasonable complexity theoretic assumptions such as: Strong Exponential
Time Hypothesis (SETH), 3SUM and All-Pairs Shortest-Paths (APSP). According to
these assumptions, many graph theoretic problems do not admit truly
subquadratic algorithms, nor even truly subcubic algorithms (Williams and
Williams, FOCS 2010 and Abboud, Grandoni, Williams, SODA 2015). A central
technique used to tackle the difficulty of the above mentioned problems is
fixed-parameter algorithms for polynomial-time problems with polynomial
dependency in the fixed parameter (P-FPT). This technique was introduced by
Abboud, Williams and Wang in SODA 2016 and continued by Husfeldt (IPEC 2016)
and Fomin et al. (SODA 2017), using the treewidth as a parameter. Applying this
technique to clique-width, another important graph parameter, remained to be
done. In this paper we study several graph theoretic problems for which
hardness results exist such as cycle problems (triangle detection, triangle
counting, girth, diameter), distance problems (diameter, eccentricities, Gromov
hyperbolicity, betweenness centrality) and maximum matching. We provide
hardness results and fully polynomial FPT algorithms, using clique-width and
some of its upper-bounds as parameters (split-width, modular-width and
-sparseness). We believe that our most important result is an -time algorithm for computing a maximum matching where
is either the modular-width or the -sparseness. The latter generalizes
many algorithms that have been introduced so far for specific subclasses such
as cographs, -lite graphs, -extendible graphs and -tidy
graphs. Our algorithms are based on preprocessing methods using modular
decomposition, split decomposition and primeval decomposition. Thus they can
also be generalized to some graph classes with unbounded clique-width
Are there any good digraph width measures?
Several different measures for digraph width have appeared in the last few
years. However, none of them shares all the "nice" properties of treewidth:
First, being \emph{algorithmically useful} i.e. admitting polynomial-time
algorithms for all \MS1-definable problems on digraphs of bounded width. And,
second, having nice \emph{structural properties} i.e. being monotone under
taking subdigraphs and some form of arc contractions. As for the former,
(undirected) \MS1 seems to be the least common denominator of all reasonably
expressive logical languages on digraphs that can speak about the edge/arc
relation on the vertex set.The latter property is a necessary condition for a
width measure to be characterizable by some version of the cops-and-robber game
characterizing the ordinary treewidth. Our main result is that \emph{any
reasonable} algorithmically useful and structurally nice digraph measure cannot
be substantially different from the treewidth of the underlying undirected
graph. Moreover, we introduce \emph{directed topological minors} and argue that
they are the weakest useful notion of minors for digraphs
Parameterized Approximation Schemes using Graph Widths
Combining the techniques of approximation algorithms and parameterized
complexity has long been considered a promising research area, but relatively
few results are currently known. In this paper we study the parameterized
approximability of a number of problems which are known to be hard to solve
exactly when parameterized by treewidth or clique-width. Our main contribution
is to present a natural randomized rounding technique that extends well-known
ideas and can be used for both of these widths. Applying this very generic
technique we obtain approximation schemes for a number of problems, evading
both polynomial-time inapproximability and parameterized intractability bounds
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