Minimum Makespan Multi-vehicle Dial-a-Ride

Dial a ride problems consist of a metric space (denoting travel time between vertices) and a set of m objects represented as source-destination pairs, where each object requires to be moved from its source to destination vertex. We consider the multi-vehicle Dial a ride problem, with each vehicle having capacity k and its own depot-vertex, where the objective is to minimize the maximum completion time (makespan) of the vehicles. We study the "preemptive" version of the problem, where an object may be left at intermediate vertices and transported by more than one vehicle, while being moved from source to destination. Our main results are an O(log^3 n)-approximation algorithm for preemptive multi-vehicle Dial a ride, and an improved O(log t)-approximation for its special case when there is no capacity constraint. We also show that the approximation ratios improve by a log-factor when the underlying metric is induced by a fixed-minor-free graph.Comment: 22 pages, 1 figure. Preliminary version appeared in ESA 200

Substring Range Reporting

We revisit various string indexing problems with range reporting features, namely, position-restricted substring searching, indexing substrings with gaps, and indexing substrings with intervals. We obtain the following main results. {itemize} We give efficient reductions for each of the above problems to a new problem, which we call \emph{substring range reporting}. Hence, we unify the previous work by showing that we may restrict our attention to a single problem rather than studying each of the above problems individually. We show how to solve substring range reporting with optimal query time and little space. Combined with our reductions this leads to significantly improved time-space trade-offs for the above problems. In particular, for each problem we obtain the first solutions with optimal time query and $O(n\log^{O(1)} n)$ space, where $n$ is the length of the indexed string. We show that our techniques for substring range reporting generalize to \emph{substring range counting} and \emph{substring range emptiness} variants. We also obtain non-trivial time-space trade-offs for these problems. {itemize} Our bounds for substring range reporting are based on a novel combination of suffix trees and range reporting data structures. The reductions are simple and general and may apply to other combinations of string indexing with range reporting