935 research outputs found
Arc-Disjoint Paths and Trees in 2-Regular Digraphs
An out-(in-)branching B_s^+ (B_s^-) rooted at s in a digraph D is a connected
spanning subdigraph of D in which every vertex x != s has precisely one arc
entering (leaving) it and s has no arcs entering (leaving) it. We settle the
complexity of the following two problems:
1) Given a 2-regular digraph , decide if it contains two arc-disjoint
branchings B^+_u, B^-_v.
2) Given a 2-regular digraph D, decide if it contains an out-branching B^+_u
such that D remains connected after removing the arcs of B^+_u.
Both problems are NP-complete for general digraphs. We prove that the first
problem remains NP-complete for 2-regular digraphs, whereas the second problem
turns out to be polynomial when we do not prescribe the root in advance. We
also prove that, for 2-regular digraphs, the latter problem is in fact
equivalent to deciding if contains two arc-disjoint out-branchings. We
generalize this result to k-regular digraphs where we want to find a number of
pairwise arc-disjoint spanning trees and out-branchings such that there are k
in total, again without prescribing any roots.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figure
On the expressive power of planar perfect matching and permanents of bounded treewidth matrices
Valiant introduced some 25 years ago an algebraic model of computation along
with the complexity classes VP and VNP, which can be viewed as analogues of the
classical classes P and NP. They are defined using non-uniform sequences of
arithmetic circuits and provides a framework to study the complexity for
sequences of polynomials. Prominent examples of difficult (that is,
VNP-complete) problems in this model includes the permanent and hamiltonian
polynomials. While the permanent and hamiltonian polynomials in general are
difficult to evaluate, there have been research on which special cases of these
polynomials admits efficient evaluation. For instance, Barvinok has shown that
if the underlying matrix has bounded rank, both the permanent and the
hamiltonian polynomials can be evaluated in polynomial time, and thus are in
VP. Courcelle, Makowsky and Rotics have shown that for matrices of bounded
treewidth several difficult problems (including evaluating the permanent and
hamiltonian polynomials) can be solved efficiently. An earlier result of this
flavour is Kasteleyn's theorem which states that the sum of weights of perfect
matchings of a planar graph can be computed in polynomial time, and thus is in
VP also. For general graphs this problem is VNP-complete. In this paper we
investigate the expressive power of the above results. We show that the
permanent and hamiltonian polynomials for matrices of bounded treewidth both
are equivalent to arithmetic formulas. Also, arithmetic weakly skew circuits
are shown to be equivalent to the sum of weights of perfect matchings of planar
graphs.Comment: 14 page
The Complexity of Routing with Few Collisions
We study the computational complexity of routing multiple objects through a
network in such a way that only few collisions occur: Given a graph with
two distinct terminal vertices and two positive integers and , the
question is whether one can connect the terminals by at least routes (e.g.
paths) such that at most edges are time-wise shared among them. We study
three types of routes: traverse each vertex at most once (paths), each edge at
most once (trails), or no such restrictions (walks). We prove that for paths
and trails the problem is NP-complete on undirected and directed graphs even if
is constant or the maximum vertex degree in the input graph is constant.
For walks, however, it is solvable in polynomial time on undirected graphs for
arbitrary and on directed graphs if is constant. We additionally study
for all route types a variant of the problem where the maximum length of a
route is restricted by some given upper bound. We prove that this
length-restricted variant has the same complexity classification with respect
to paths and trails, but for walks it becomes NP-complete on undirected graphs
Walking Through Waypoints
We initiate the study of a fundamental combinatorial problem: Given a
capacitated graph , find a shortest walk ("route") from a source to a destination that includes all vertices specified by a set
: the \emph{waypoints}. This waypoint routing problem
finds immediate applications in the context of modern networked distributed
systems. Our main contribution is an exact polynomial-time algorithm for graphs
of bounded treewidth. We also show that if the number of waypoints is
logarithmically bounded, exact polynomial-time algorithms exist even for
general graphs. Our two algorithms provide an almost complete characterization
of what can be solved exactly in polynomial-time: we show that more general
problems (e.g., on grid graphs of maximum degree 3, with slightly more
waypoints) are computationally intractable
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