1,750 research outputs found
The Salesman's Improved Tours for Fundamental Classes
Finding the exact integrality gap for the LP relaxation of the
metric Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) has been an open problem for over
thirty years, with little progress made. It is known that , and a famous conjecture states . For this problem,
essentially two "fundamental" classes of instances have been proposed. This
fundamental property means that in order to show that the integrality gap is at
most for all instances of metric TSP, it is sufficient to show it only
for the instances in the fundamental class. However, despite the importance and
the simplicity of such classes, no apparent effort has been deployed for
improving the integrality gap bounds for them. In this paper we take a natural
first step in this endeavour, and consider the -integer points of one such
class. We successfully improve the upper bound for the integrality gap from
to for a superclass of these points, as well as prove a lower
bound of for the superclass. Our methods involve innovative applications
of tools from combinatorial optimization which have the potential to be more
broadly applied
Probabilistic Analysis of Optimization Problems on Generalized Random Shortest Path Metrics
Simple heuristics often show a remarkable performance in practice for
optimization problems. Worst-case analysis often falls short of explaining this
performance. Because of this, "beyond worst-case analysis" of algorithms has
recently gained a lot of attention, including probabilistic analysis of
algorithms.
The instances of many optimization problems are essentially a discrete metric
space. Probabilistic analysis for such metric optimization problems has
nevertheless mostly been conducted on instances drawn from Euclidean space,
which provides a structure that is usually heavily exploited in the analysis.
However, most instances from practice are not Euclidean. Little work has been
done on metric instances drawn from other, more realistic, distributions. Some
initial results have been obtained by Bringmann et al. (Algorithmica, 2013),
who have used random shortest path metrics on complete graphs to analyze
heuristics.
The goal of this paper is to generalize these findings to non-complete
graphs, especially Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi random graphs. A random shortest path
metric is constructed by drawing independent random edge weights for each edge
in the graph and setting the distance between every pair of vertices to the
length of a shortest path between them with respect to the drawn weights. For
such instances, we prove that the greedy heuristic for the minimum distance
maximum matching problem, the nearest neighbor and insertion heuristics for the
traveling salesman problem, and a trivial heuristic for the -median problem
all achieve a constant expected approximation ratio. Additionally, we show a
polynomial upper bound for the expected number of iterations of the 2-opt
heuristic for the traveling salesman problem.Comment: An extended abstract appeared in the proceedings of WALCOM 201
Constant-Factor Approximation for TSP with Disks
We revisit the traveling salesman problem with neighborhoods (TSPN) and
present the first constant-ratio approximation for disks in the plane: Given a
set of disks in the plane, a TSP tour whose length is at most times
the optimal can be computed in time that is polynomial in . Our result is
the first constant-ratio approximation for a class of planar convex bodies of
arbitrary size and arbitrary intersections. In order to achieve a
-approximation, we reduce the traveling salesman problem with disks, up
to constant factors, to a minimum weight hitting set problem in a geometric
hypergraph. The connection between TSPN and hitting sets in geometric
hypergraphs, established here, is likely to have future applications.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure
Keyword-aware Optimal Route Search
Identifying a preferable route is an important problem that finds
applications in map services. When a user plans a trip within a city, the user
may want to find "a most popular route such that it passes by shopping mall,
restaurant, and pub, and the travel time to and from his hotel is within 4
hours." However, none of the algorithms in the existing work on route planning
can be used to answer such queries. Motivated by this, we define the problem of
keyword-aware optimal route query, denoted by KOR, which is to find an optimal
route such that it covers a set of user-specified keywords, a specified budget
constraint is satisfied, and an objective score of the route is optimal. The
problem of answering KOR queries is NP-hard. We devise an approximation
algorithm OSScaling with provable approximation bounds. Based on this
algorithm, another more efficient approximation algorithm BucketBound is
proposed. We also design a greedy approximation algorithm. Results of empirical
studies show that all the proposed algorithms are capable of answering KOR
queries efficiently, while the BucketBound and Greedy algorithms run faster.
The empirical studies also offer insight into the accuracy of the proposed
algorithms.Comment: VLDB201
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