Spanners for Geometric Intersection Graphs

Efficient algorithms are presented for constructing spanners in geometric intersection graphs. For a unit ball graph in R^k, a (1+\epsilon)-spanner is obtained using efficient partitioning of the space into hypercubes and solving bichromatic closest pair problems. The spanner construction has almost equivalent complexity to the construction of Euclidean minimum spanning trees. The results are extended to arbitrary ball graphs with a sub-quadratic running time. For unit ball graphs, the spanners have a small separator decomposition which can be used to obtain efficient algorithms for approximating proximity problems like diameter and distance queries. The results on compressed quadtrees, geometric graph separators, and diameter approximation might be of independent interest.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figures, Late

Linear Expected Complexity for Directional and Multiplicative Voronoi Diagrams

While the standard unweighted Voronoi diagram in the plane has linear worst-case complexity, many of its natural generalizations do not. This paper considers two such previously studied generalizations, namely multiplicative and semi Voronoi diagrams. These diagrams both have quadratic worst-case complexity, though here we show that their expected complexity is linear for certain natural randomized inputs. Specifically, we argue that the expected complexity is linear for: (1) semi Voronoi diagrams when the visible direction is randomly sampled, and (2) for multiplicative diagrams when either weights are sampled from a constant-sized set, or the more challenging case when weights are arbitrary but locations are sampled from a square

Dynamic Connectivity in Disk Graphs

Let S ⊆ R2 be a set of n sites in the plane, so that every site s ∈ S has an associated radius rs > 0. Let D(S) be the disk intersection graph defined by S, i.e., the graph with vertex set S and an edge between two distinct sites s, t ∈ S if and only if the disks with centers s, t and radii rs , rt intersect. Our goal is to design data structures that maintain the connectivity structure of D(S) as sites are inserted and/or deleted in S. First, we consider unit disk graphs, i.e., we fix rs = 1, for all sites s ∈ S. For this case, we describe a data structure that has O(log2 n) amortized update time and O(log n/ log log n) query time. Second, we look at disk graphs with bounded radius ratio Ψ, i.e., for all s ∈ S, we have 1 ≤ rs ≤ Ψ, for a parameter Ψ that is known in advance. Here, we not only investigate the fully dynamic case, but also the incremental and the decremental scenario, where only insertions or only deletions of sites are allowed. In the fully dynamic case, we achieve amortized expected update time O(Ψ log4 n) and query time O(log n/ log log n). This improves the currently best update time by a factor of Ψ. In the incremental case, we achieve logarithmic dependency on Ψ, with a data structure that has O(α(n)) amortized query time and O(log Ψ log4 n) amortized expected update time, where α(n) denotes the inverse Ackermann function. For the decremental setting, we first develop an efficient decremental disk revealing data structure: given two sets R and B of disks in the plane, we can delete disks from B, and upon each deletion, we receive a list of all disks in R that no longer intersect the union of B. Using this data structure, we get decremental data structures with a query time of O(log n/ log log n) that supports deletions in O(n log Ψ log4 n) overall expected time for disk graphs with bounded radius ratio Ψ and O(n log5 n) overall expected time for disk graphs with arbitrary radii, assuming that the deletion sequence is oblivious of the internal random choices of the data structures

Districting Problems - New Geometrically Motivated Approaches

This thesis focuses on districting problems were the basic areas are represented by points or lines. In the context of points, it presents approaches that utilize the problem\u27s underlying geometrical information. For lines it introduces an algorithm combining features of geometric approaches, tabu search, and adaptive randomized neighborhood search that includes the routing distances explicitly. Moreover, this thesis summarizes, compares and enhances existing compactness measures