7,545 research outputs found
Exact algorithms for the order picking problem
Order picking is the problem of collecting a set of products in a warehouse
in a minimum amount of time. It is currently a major bottleneck in supply-chain
because of its cost in time and labor force. This article presents two exact
and effective algorithms for this problem. Firstly, a sparse formulation in
mixed-integer programming is strengthened by preprocessing and valid
inequalities. Secondly, a dynamic programming approach generalizing known
algorithms for two or three cross-aisles is proposed and evaluated
experimentally. Performances of these algorithms are reported and compared with
the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) solver Concorde
Who witnesses The Witness? Finding witnesses in The Witness is hard and sometimes impossible
We analyze the computational complexity of the many types of
pencil-and-paper-style puzzles featured in the 2016 puzzle video game The
Witness. In all puzzles, the goal is to draw a simple path in a rectangular
grid graph from a start vertex to a destination vertex. The different puzzle
types place different constraints on the path: preventing some edges from being
visited (broken edges); forcing some edges or vertices to be visited
(hexagons); forcing some cells to have certain numbers of incident path edges
(triangles); or forcing the regions formed by the path to be partially
monochromatic (squares), have exactly two special cells (stars), or be singly
covered by given shapes (polyominoes) and/or negatively counting shapes
(antipolyominoes). We show that any one of these clue types (except the first)
is enough to make path finding NP-complete ("witnesses exist but are hard to
find"), even for rectangular boards. Furthermore, we show that a final clue
type (antibody), which necessarily "cancels" the effect of another clue in the
same region, makes path finding -complete ("witnesses do not exist"),
even with a single antibody (combined with many anti/polyominoes), and the
problem gets no harder with many antibodies. On the positive side, we give a
polynomial-time algorithm for monomino clues, by reducing to hexagon clues on
the boundary of the puzzle, even in the presence of broken edges, and solving
"subset Hamiltonian path" for terminals on the boundary of an embedded planar
graph in polynomial time.Comment: 72 pages, 59 figures. Revised proof of Lemma 3.5. A short version of
this paper appeared at the 9th International Conference on Fun with
Algorithms (FUN 2018
A discrete districting plan
The outcome of elections is strongly dependent on the districting choices,
making thus possible (and frequent) the gerrymandering phenomenon, i.e.\
politicians suitably changing the shape of electoral districts in order to win
the forthcoming elections. While so far the problem has been treated using
continuous analysis tools, it has been recently pointed out that a more
reality-adherent model would use the discrete geometry of graphs or networks.
Here we propose a parameter-dependent discrete model for choosing an "optimal"
districting plan. We analyze several properties of the model and lay
foundations for further analysis on the subject
Robust capacitated trees and networks with uniform demands
We are interested in the design of robust (or resilient) capacitated rooted
Steiner networks in case of terminals with uniform demands. Formally, we are
given a graph, capacity and cost functions on the edges, a root, a subset of
nodes called terminals, and a bound k on the number of edge failures. We first
study the problem where k = 1 and the network that we want to design must be a
tree covering the root and the terminals: we give complexity results and
propose models to optimize both the cost of the tree and the number of
terminals disconnected from the root in the worst case of an edge failure,
while respecting the capacity constraints on the edges. Second, we consider the
problem of computing a minimum-cost survivable network, i.e., a network that
covers the root and terminals even after the removal of any k edges, while
still respecting the capacity constraints on the edges. We also consider the
possibility of protecting a given number of edges. We propose three different
formulations: a cut-set based formulation, a flow based one, and a bilevel one
(with an attacker and a defender). We propose algorithms to solve each
formulation and compare their efficiency
Secluded Connectivity Problems
Consider a setting where possibly sensitive information sent over a path in a
network is visible to every {neighbor} of the path, i.e., every neighbor of
some node on the path, thus including the nodes on the path itself. The
exposure of a path can be measured as the number of nodes adjacent to it,
denoted by . A path is said to be secluded if its exposure is small. A
similar measure can be applied to other connected subgraphs, such as Steiner
trees connecting a given set of terminals. Such subgraphs may be relevant due
to considerations of privacy, security or revenue maximization. This paper
considers problems related to minimum exposure connectivity structures such as
paths and Steiner trees. It is shown that on unweighted undirected -node
graphs, the problem of finding the minimum exposure path connecting a given
pair of vertices is strongly inapproximable, i.e., hard to approximate within a
factor of for any (under an
appropriate complexity assumption), but is approximable with ratio
, where is the maximum degree in the graph. One of
our main results concerns the class of bounded-degree graphs, which is shown to
exhibit the following interesting dichotomy. On the one hand, the minimum
exposure path problem is NP-hard on node-weighted or directed bounded-degree
graphs (even when the maximum degree is 4). On the other hand, we present a
polynomial algorithm (based on a nontrivial dynamic program) for the problem on
unweighted undirected bounded-degree graphs. Likewise, the problem is shown to
be polynomial also for the class of (weighted or unweighted) bounded-treewidth
graphs
Modeling and heuristic worst-case performance analysis of the two-level network design problem
"Revised: November 1992"--2nd prelim. p.Includes bibliographical references.Supported by a grant from the AT&T Research Fund. Supported by a Faculty Grant from the Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh.Anantaram Balakrishnan, Thomas L. Magnanti and Prakash Mirchandani
- …