11,243 research outputs found
Incorporating Road Networks into Territory Design
Given a set of basic areas, the territory design problem asks to create a
predefined number of territories, each containing at least one basic area, such
that an objective function is optimized. Desired properties of territories
often include a reasonable balance, compact form, contiguity and small average
journey times which are usually encoded in the objective function or formulated
as constraints. We address the territory design problem by developing graph
theoretic models that also consider the underlying road network. The derived
graph models enable us to tackle the territory design problem by modifying
graph partitioning algorithms and mixed integer programming formulations so
that the objective of the planning problem is taken into account. We test and
compare the algorithms on several real world instances
Approximately Sampling Elements with Fixed Rank in Graded Posets
Graded posets frequently arise throughout combinatorics, where it is natural
to try to count the number of elements of a fixed rank. These counting problems
are often -complete, so we consider approximation algorithms for
counting and uniform sampling. We show that for certain classes of posets,
biased Markov chains that walk along edges of their Hasse diagrams allow us to
approximately generate samples with any fixed rank in expected polynomial time.
Our arguments do not rely on the typical proofs of log-concavity, which are
used to construct a stationary distribution with a specific mode in order to
give a lower bound on the probability of outputting an element of the desired
rank. Instead, we infer this directly from bounds on the mixing time of the
chains through a method we call .
A noteworthy application of our method is sampling restricted classes of
integer partitions of . We give the first provably efficient Markov chain
algorithm to uniformly sample integer partitions of from general restricted
classes. Several observations allow us to improve the efficiency of this chain
to require space, and for unrestricted integer partitions,
expected time. Related applications include sampling permutations
with a fixed number of inversions and lozenge tilings on the triangular lattice
with a fixed average height.Comment: 23 pages, 12 figure
Dimension Reduction via Colour Refinement
Colour refinement is a basic algorithmic routine for graph isomorphism
testing, appearing as a subroutine in almost all practical isomorphism solvers.
It partitions the vertices of a graph into "colour classes" in such a way that
all vertices in the same colour class have the same number of neighbours in
every colour class. Tinhofer (Disc. App. Math., 1991), Ramana, Scheinerman, and
Ullman (Disc. Math., 1994) and Godsil (Lin. Alg. and its App., 1997)
established a tight correspondence between colour refinement and fractional
isomorphisms of graphs, which are solutions to the LP relaxation of a natural
ILP formulation of graph isomorphism.
We introduce a version of colour refinement for matrices and extend existing
quasilinear algorithms for computing the colour classes. Then we generalise the
correspondence between colour refinement and fractional automorphisms and
develop a theory of fractional automorphisms and isomorphisms of matrices.
We apply our results to reduce the dimensions of systems of linear equations
and linear programs. Specifically, we show that any given LP L can efficiently
be transformed into a (potentially) smaller LP L' whose number of variables and
constraints is the number of colour classes of the colour refinement algorithm,
applied to a matrix associated with the LP. The transformation is such that we
can easily (by a linear mapping) map both feasible and optimal solutions back
and forth between the two LPs. We demonstrate empirically that colour
refinement can indeed greatly reduce the cost of solving linear programs
Task allocation in a distributed computing system
A conceptual framework is examined for task allocation in distributed systems. Application and computing system parameters critical to task allocation decision processes are discussed. Task allocation techniques are addressed which focus on achieving a balance in the load distribution among the system's processors. Equalization of computing load among the processing elements is the goal. Examples of system performance are presented for specific applications. Both static and dynamic allocation of tasks are considered and system performance is evaluated using different task allocation methodologies
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