A PTAS for Three-Edge-Connected Survivable Network Design in Planar Graphs

We consider the problem of finding the minimum-weight subgraph that satisfies given connectivity requirements. Specifically, given a requirement r in {0, 1, 2, 3} for every vertex, we seek the minimum-weight subgraph that contains, for every pair of vertices u and v, at least min{r(v), r(u)} edge-disjoint u-to-v paths. We give a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for this problem when the input graph is planar and the subgraph may use multiple copies of any given edge (paying for each edge separately). This generalizes an earlier result for r in {0, 1, 2}. In order to achieve this PTAS, we prove some properties of triconnected planar graphs that may be of independent interest

Approximation Schemes in Planar Graphs

There are growing interests in designing polynomial-time approximation schemes (PTAS) for optimization problems in planar graphs. Many NP-hard problems are shown to admit PTAS in planar graphs in the last decade, including Steiner tree, Steiner forest, two- edge-connected subgraphs and so on. We follow this research line and study several NP- hard problems in planar graphs, including minimum three-vertex-connected spanning subgraph problem, minimum three-edge-connected spanning subgraph problem, relaxed minimum-weight subset three-edge-connected subgraph problem and minimum feedback vertex set problem. For the first three problems, we give the first PTAS results, and for the last problem, we give a PTAS result based on local search and a practical heuristic algorithm that provides a trade-off between running time and solution quality like a PTAS