1,842 research outputs found
The cavity approach for Steiner trees packing problems
The Belief Propagation approximation, or cavity method, has been recently
applied to several combinatorial optimization problems in its zero-temperature
implementation, the max-sum algorithm. In particular, recent developments to
solve the edge-disjoint paths problem and the prize-collecting Steiner tree
problem on graphs have shown remarkable results for several classes of graphs
and for benchmark instances. Here we propose a generalization of these
techniques for two variants of the Steiner trees packing problem where multiple
"interacting" trees have to be sought within a given graph. Depending on the
interaction among trees we distinguish the vertex-disjoint Steiner trees
problem, where trees cannot share nodes, from the edge-disjoint Steiner trees
problem, where edges cannot be shared by trees but nodes can be members of
multiple trees. Several practical problems of huge interest in network design
can be mapped into these two variants, for instance, the physical design of
Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) chips. The formalism described here relies
on two components edge-variables that allows us to formulate a massage-passing
algorithm for the V-DStP and two algorithms for the E-DStP differing in the
scaling of the computational time with respect to some relevant parameters. We
will show that one of the two formalisms used for the edge-disjoint variant
allow us to map the max-sum update equations into a weighted maximum matching
problem over proper bipartite graphs. We developed a heuristic procedure based
on the max-sum equations that shows excellent performance in synthetic networks
(in particular outperforming standard multi-step greedy procedures by large
margins) and on large benchmark instances of VLSI for which the optimal
solution is known, on which the algorithm found the optimum in two cases and
the gap to optimality was never larger than 4 %
The edge-disjoint path problem on random graphs by message-passing
We present a message-passing algorithm to solve the edge disjoint path
problem (EDP) on graphs incorporating under a unique framework both traffic
optimization and path length minimization. The min-sum equations for this
problem present an exponential computational cost in the number of paths. To
overcome this obstacle we propose an efficient implementation by mapping the
equations onto a weighted combinatorial matching problem over an auxiliary
graph. We perform extensive numerical simulations on random graphs of various
types to test the performance both in terms of path length minimization and
maximization of the number of accommodated paths. In addition, we test the
performance on benchmark instances on various graphs by comparison with
state-of-the-art algorithms and results found in the literature. Our
message-passing algorithm always outperforms the others in terms of the number
of accommodated paths when considering non trivial instances (otherwise it
gives the same trivial results). Remarkably, the largest improvement in
performance with respect to the other methods employed is found in the case of
benchmarks with meshes, where the validity hypothesis behind message-passing is
expected to worsen. In these cases, even though the exact message-passing
equations do not converge, by introducing a reinforcement parameter to force
convergence towards a sub optimal solution, we were able to always outperform
the other algorithms with a peak of 27% performance improvement in terms of
accommodated paths. On random graphs, we numerically observe two separated
regimes: one in which all paths can be accommodated and one in which this is
not possible. We also investigate the behaviour of both the number of paths to
be accommodated and their minimum total length.Comment: 14 pages, 8 figure
Improved Approximation Algorithms for PRIZE-COLLECTING STEINER TREE and TSP
Abstract — We study the prize-collecting versions of the Steiner tree, traveling salesman, and stroll (a.k.a. PATH-TSP) problems (PCST, PCTSP, and PCS, respectively): given a graph (V, E) with costs on each edge and a penalty (a.k.a. prize) on each node, the goal is to find a tree (for PCST), cycle (for PCTSP), or stroll (for PCS) that minimizes the sum of the edge costs in the tree/cycle/stroll and the penalties of the nodes not spanned by it. In addition to being a useful theoretical tool for helping to solve other optimization problems, PCST has been applied fruitfully by AT&T to the optimization of real-world telecommunications networks. The most recent improvements for the first two problems, giving a 2-approximation algorithm for each, appeared first in 1992. (A 2-approximation for PCS appeared in 2003.) The natural linear programming (LP) relaxation of PCST has an integrality gap of 2, which has been a barrier to further improvements for this problem. We present (2 − ɛ)-approximation algorithms for all three problems, connected by a unified technique for improving prizecollecting algorithms that allows us to circumvent the integrality gap barrier. 1
LP Relaxation and Tree Packing for Minimum k-cuts
Karger used spanning tree packings [Karger, 2000] to derive a near linear-time randomized algorithm for the global minimum cut problem as well as a bound on the number of approximate minimum cuts. This is a different approach from his well-known random contraction algorithm [Karger, 1995; Karger and Stein, 1996]. Thorup developed a fast deterministic algorithm for the minimum k-cut problem via greedy recursive tree packings [Thorup, 2008].
In this paper we revisit properties of an LP relaxation for k-cut proposed by Naor and Rabani [Naor and Rabani, 2001], and analyzed in [Chekuri et al., 2006]. We show that the dual of the LP yields a tree packing, that when combined with an upper bound on the integrality gap for the LP, easily and transparently extends Karger\u27s analysis for mincut to the k-cut problem. In addition to the simplicity of the algorithm and its analysis, this allows us to improve the running time of Thorup\u27s algorithm by a factor of n. We also improve the bound on the number of alpha-approximate k-cuts. Second, we give a simple proof that the integrality gap of the LP is 2(1-1/n). Third, we show that an optimum solution to the LP relaxation, for all values of k, is fully determined by the principal sequence of partitions of the input graph. This allows us to relate the LP relaxation to the Lagrangean relaxation approach of Barahona [Barahona, 2000] and Ravi and Sinha [Ravi and Sinha, 2008]; it also shows that the idealized recursive tree packing considered by Thorup gives an optimum dual solution to the LP. This work arose from an effort to understand and simplify the results of Thorup [Thorup, 2008]
- …