101 research outputs found
The Maximum Traveling Salesman Problem with Submodular Rewards
In this paper, we look at the problem of finding the tour of maximum reward
on an undirected graph where the reward is a submodular function, that has a
curvature of , of the edges in the tour. This problem is known to be
NP-hard. We analyze two simple algorithms for finding an approximate solution.
Both algorithms require oracle calls to the submodular function. The
approximation factors are shown to be and
, respectively; so the second
method has better bounds for low values of . We also look at how these
algorithms perform for a directed graph and investigate a method to consider
edge costs in addition to rewards. The problem has direct applications in
monitoring an environment using autonomous mobile sensors where the sensing
reward depends on the path taken. We provide simulation results to empirically
evaluate the performance of the algorithms.Comment: Extended version of ACC 2013 submission (including p-system greedy
bound with curvature
An evolutionary algorithm for online, resource constrained, multi-vehicle sensing mission planning
Mobile robotic platforms are an indispensable tool for various scientific and
industrial applications. Robots are used to undertake missions whose execution
is constrained by various factors, such as the allocated time or their
remaining energy. Existing solutions for resource constrained multi-robot
sensing mission planning provide optimal plans at a prohibitive computational
complexity for online application [1],[2],[3]. A heuristic approach exists for
an online, resource constrained sensing mission planning for a single vehicle
[4]. This work proposes a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based heuristic for the
Correlated Team Orienteering Problem (CTOP) that is used for planning sensing
and monitoring missions for robotic teams that operate under resource
constraints. The heuristic is compared against optimal Mixed Integer Quadratic
Programming (MIQP) solutions. Results show that the quality of the heuristic
solution is at the worst case equal to the 5% optimal solution. The heuristic
solution proves to be at least 300 times more time efficient in the worst
tested case. The GA heuristic execution required in the worst case less than a
second making it suitable for online execution.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in Robotics and
Automation Letters (RA-L
Constant-Factor Approximation to Deadline TSP and Related Problems in (Almost) Quasi-Polytime
We investigate a genre of vehicle-routing problems (VRPs), that we call max-reward VRPs, wherein nodes located in a metric space have associated rewards that depend on their visiting times, and we seek a path that earns maximum reward. A prominent problem in this genre is deadline TSP, where nodes have deadlines and we seek a path that visits all nodes by their deadlines and earns maximum reward. Our main result is a constant-factor approximation for deadline TSP running in time O(n^O(log(n?))) in metric spaces with integer distances at most ?. This is the first improvement over the approximation factor of O(log n) due to Bansal et al. [N. Bansal et al., 2004] in over 15 years (but is achieved in super-polynomial time). Our result provides the first concrete indication that log n is unlikely to be a real inapproximability barrier for deadline TSP, and raises the exciting possibility that deadline TSP might admit a polytime constant-factor approximation.
At a high level, we obtain our result by carefully guessing an appropriate sequence of O(log (n?)) nodes appearing on the optimal path, and finding suitable paths between any two consecutive guessed nodes. We argue that the problem of finding a path between two consecutive guessed nodes can be relaxed to an instance of a special case of deadline TSP called point-to-point (P2P) orienteering. Any approximation algorithm for P2P orienteering can then be utilized in conjunction with either a greedy approach, or an LP-rounding approach, to find a good set of paths overall between every pair of guessed nodes. While concatenating these paths does not immediately yield a feasible solution, we argue that it can be covered by a constant number of feasible solutions. Overall our result therefore provides a novel reduction showing that any ?-approximation for P2P orienteering can be leveraged to obtain an O(?)-approximation for deadline TSP in O(n^O(log n?)) time.
Our results extend to yield the same guarantees (in approximation ratio and running time) for a substantial generalization of deadline TSP, where the reward obtained by a client is given by an arbitrary non-increasing function (specified by a value oracle) of its visiting time. Finally, we discuss applications of our results to variants of deadline TSP, including settings where both end-nodes are specified, nodes have release dates, and orienteering with time windows
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