Vertex Disjoint Paths for Dispatching in Railways

We study variants of the vertex disjoint paths problem in planar graphs where paths have to be selected from a given set of paths. We study the problem as a decision, maximization, and routing-in-rounds problem. Although all considered variants are NP-hard in planar graphs, restrictions on the location of the terminals, motivated by railway applications, lead to polynomially solvable cases for the decision and maximization versions of the problem, and to a $p$-approximation algorithm for the routing-in-rounds problem, where $p$ is the maximum number of alternative paths for a terminal pair

Freight car dispatching with generalized flows

In the freight car dispatching problem empty freight cars have to be assigned to known demands respecting a given time horizon and certain constraints. The goal is to minimize the resulting transportation costs. One of the constraints is that customers can specify the type of cars they want. It is possible, however, that cars of certain types can be substituted by other cars, either in a 1-to-1 fashion or at different exchange rates. We show that these substitutions make the dispatching problem hard to solve and hard to approximate. We model the dispatching problem as an integral generalized transportation problem on a bipartite graph. Using rounding techniques, the LP-relaxation can be transformed to a transportation schedule violating some of the constraints slightly. Under an additional assumption on the cost function we fix this violation and derive a $4$-approximation of the problem

An Algorithm for the Maximum Weight Independent Set Problem on Outerstring Graphs

Outerstring graphs are the intersection graphs of curves that lie inside a disk such that each curve intersects the boundary of the disk. Outerstring graphs are among the most general classes of intersection graphs studied. To date, no polynomial time algorithm is known for any of the classical graph optimization problems on outerstring graphs; in fact, most are NP-hard. It is known that there is an intersection model for any outerstring graph that consists of polygonal arcs attached to a circle. However, this representation may require an exponential number of segments relative to the size of the graph. Given an outerstring graph and an intersection model consisting of polygonal arcs with a total of N segments, we develop an algorithm that solves the Maximum Weight Independent Set problem in O(N³) time. If the polygonal arcs are restricted to single segments, then outersegment graphs result. For outersegment graphs, we solve the Maximum Weight Independent Set problem in O(n³) time where n is the number of vertices in the graph

Train Scheduling on a Unidirectional Path

We formulate what might be the simplest train scheduling problem considered in the literature and show it to be NP-hard. We also give a log-factor randomised algorithm for it. In our problem we have a unidirectional train track with equidistant stations, each station initially having at most one train. In addition, there can be at most one train poised to enter each station. The trains must move to their destinations subject to the constraint that at every time instant there can be at most one train at each station and on the track between stations. The goal is to minimise the maximum delay of any train. Our problem can also be interpreted as a packet routing problem, and our work strengthens the hardness results from that literature