Cataloged from PDF version of article.A special class of quadratic pseudo-boolean functions called “half-products” (HP) has recently been introduced. It has been
shown that HP minimization, while NP-hard, admits a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS). In this note, we
provide a more efficient FPTAS. We further show how an FPTAS can also be derived for the general case where the HP function is
augmented by a problem-dependent constant and can justifiably be assumed to be nonnegative. This leads to an FPTAS for certain
partitioning type problems, including many from the field of scheduling.
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