156 research outputs found
AFPTAS results for common variants of bin packing: A new method to handle the small items
We consider two well-known natural variants of bin packing, and show that
these packing problems admit asymptotic fully polynomial time approximation
schemes (AFPTAS). In bin packing problems, a set of one-dimensional items of
size at most 1 is to be assigned (packed) to subsets of sum at most 1 (bins).
It has been known for a while that the most basic problem admits an AFPTAS. In
this paper, we develop methods that allow to extend this result to other
variants of bin packing. Specifically, the problems which we study in this
paper, for which we design asymptotic fully polynomial time approximation
schemes, are the following. The first problem is "Bin packing with cardinality
constraints", where a parameter k is given, such that a bin may contain up to k
items. The goal is to minimize the number of bins used. The second problem is
"Bin packing with rejection", where every item has a rejection penalty
associated with it. An item needs to be either packed to a bin or rejected, and
the goal is to minimize the number of used bins plus the total rejection
penalty of unpacked items. This resolves the complexity of two important
variants of the bin packing problem. Our approximation schemes use a novel
method for packing the small items. This new method is the core of the improved
running times of our schemes over the running times of the previous results,
which are only asymptotic polynomial time approximation schemes (APTAS)
Improved approximation guarantees for weighted matching in the semi-streaming model
We study the maximum weight matching problem in the semi-streaming model, and
improve on the currently best one-pass algorithm due to Zelke (Proc. of
STACS2008, pages 669-680) by devising a deterministic approach whose
performance guarantee is 4.91+epsilon. In addition, we study preemptive online
algorithms, a sub-class of one-pass algorithms where we are only allowed to
maintain a feasible matching in memory at any point in time. All known results
prior to Zelke's belong to this sub-class. We provide a lower bound of 4.967 on
the competitive ratio of any such deterministic algorithm, and hence show that
future improvements will have to store in memory a set of edges which is not
necessarily a feasible matching
Approximating min-max k-clustering
We consider the
problems
of set partitioning into clusters with minimum of the maximum cost of a cluster. The cost function is given by an oracle, and we assume that it satisfies some natural structural constraints. That is, we assume that the cost function is monotone, the cost of a singleton is zero, and we assume that for all the following holds
. For this problem we present
a -approximation algorithm for , a
2-approximation algorithm for , and we also show a lower
bound of on the performance guarantee of any
polynomial-time algorithm.
We then consider special cases of this problem arising in vehicle routing problems, and present improved results
Improved Bounds for Online Preemptive Matching
When designing a preemptive online algorithm for the maximum matching
problem, we wish to maintain a valid matching M while edges of the underlying
graph are presented one after the other. When presented with an edge e, the
algorithm should decide whether to augment the matching M by adding e (in which
case e may be removed later on) or to keep M in its current form without adding
e (in which case e is lost for good). The objective is to eventually hold a
matching M with maximum weight.
The main contribution of this paper is to establish new lower and upper
bounds on the competitive ratio achievable by preemptive online algorithms:
1. We provide a lower bound of 1+ln 2~1.693 on the competitive ratio of any
randomized algorithm for the maximum cardinality matching problem, thus
improving on the currently best known bound of e/(e-1)~1.581 due to Karp,
Vazirani, and Vazirani [STOC'90].
2. We devise a randomized algorithm that achieves an expected competitive
ratio of 5.356 for maximum weight matching. This finding demonstrates the power
of randomization in this context, showing how to beat the tight bound of 3
+2\sqrt{2}~5.828 for deterministic algorithms, obtained by combining the 5.828
upper bound of McGregor [APPROX'05] and the recent 5.828 lower bound of
Varadaraja [ICALP'11]
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