scholarly journals Safe Approximation—An Efficient Solution for a Hard Routing Problem

Algorithms ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
András Faragó ◽  
Zohre R. Mojaveri

The Disjoint Connecting Paths problem and its capacitated generalization, called Unsplittable Flow problem, play an important role in practical applications such as communication network design and routing. These tasks are NP-hard in general, but various polynomial-time approximations are known. Nevertheless, the approximations tend to be either too loose (allowing large deviation from the optimum), or too complicated, often rendering them impractical in large, complex networks. Therefore, our goal is to present a solution that provides a relatively simple, efficient algorithm for the unsplittable flow problem in large directed graphs, where the task is NP-hard, and is known to remain NP-hard even to approximate up to a large factor. The efficiency of our algorithm is achieved by sacrificing a small part of the solution space. This also represents a novel paradigm for approximation. Rather than giving up the search for an exact solution, we restrict the solution space to a subset that is the most important for applications, and excludes only a small part that is marginal in some well-defined sense. Specifically, the sacrificed part only contains scenarios where some edges are very close to saturation. Since nearly saturated links are undesirable in practical applications, therefore, excluding near saturation is quite reasonable from the practical point of view. We refer the solutions that contain no nearly saturated edges as safe solutions, and call the approach safe approximation. We prove that this safe approximation can be carried out efficiently. That is, once we restrict ourselves to safe solutions, we can find the exact optimum by a randomized polynomial time algorithm.

10.29007/v68w ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ying Zhu ◽  
Mirek Truszczynski

We study the problem of learning the importance of preferences in preference profiles in two important cases: when individual preferences are aggregated by the ranked Pareto rule, and when they are aggregated by positional scoring rules. For the ranked Pareto rule, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm that finds a ranking of preferences such that the ranked profile correctly decides all the examples, whenever such a ranking exists. We also show that the problem to learn a ranking maximizing the number of correctly decided examples (also under the ranked Pareto rule) is NP-hard. We obtain similar results for the case of weighted profiles when positional scoring rules are used for aggregation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ha-Bang Ban ◽  
Phuong Khanh Nguyen

AbstractThe Asymmetric Distance-Constrained Vehicle Routing Problem (ADVRP) is NP-hard as it is a natural extension of the NP-hard Vehicle Routing Problem. In ADVRP problem, each customer is visited exactly once by a vehicle; every tour starts and ends at a depot; and the traveled distance by each vehicle is not allowed to exceed a predetermined limit. We propose a hybrid metaheuristic algorithm combining the Randomized Variable Neighborhood Search (RVNS) and the Tabu Search (TS) to solve the problem. The combination of multiple neighborhoods and tabu mechanism is used for their capacity to escape local optima while exploring the solution space. Furthermore, the intensification and diversification phases are also included to deliver optimized and diversified solutions. Extensive numerical experiments and comparisons with all the state-of-the-art algorithms show that the proposed method is highly competitive in terms of solution quality and computation time, providing new best solutions for a number of instances.


Algorithmica ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 81 (4) ◽  
pp. 1535-1560 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pietro Cenciarelli ◽  
Daniele Gorla ◽  
Ivano Salvo

Author(s):  
Hrayer Aprahamian ◽  
Hadi El-Amine

We study the design of large-scale group testing schemes under a heterogeneous population (i.e., subjects with potentially different risk) and with the availability of multiple tests. The objective is to classify the population as positive or negative for a given binary characteristic (e.g., the presence of an infectious disease) as efficiently and accurately as possible. Our approach examines components often neglected in the literature, such as the dependence of testing cost on the group size and the possibility of no testing, which are especially relevant within a heterogeneous setting. By developing key structural properties of the resulting optimization problem, we are able to reduce it to a network flow problem under a specific, yet not too restrictive, objective function. We then provide results that facilitate the construction of the resulting graph and finally provide a polynomial time algorithm. Our case study, on the screening of HIV in the United States, demonstrates the substantial benefits of the proposed approach over conventional screening methods. Summary of Contribution: This paper studies the problem of testing heterogeneous populations in groups in order to reduce costs and hence allow for the use of more efficient tests for high-risk groups. The resulting problem is a difficult combinatorial optimization problem that is NP-complete under a general objective. Using structural properties specific to our objective function, we show that the problem can be cast as a network flow problem and provide a polynomial time algorithm.


2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (03) ◽  
pp. 225-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID KIRKPATRICK ◽  
BOTING YANG ◽  
SANDRA ZILLES

Given an arrangement A of n sensors and two points s and t in the plane, the barrier resilience of A with respect to s and t is the minimum number of sensors whose removal permits a path from s to t such that the path does not intersect the coverage region of any sensor in A. When the surveillance domain is the entire plane and sensor coverage regions are unit line segments, even with restricted orientations, the problem of determining the barrier resilience is known to be NP-hard. On the other hand, if sensor coverage regions are arbitrary lines, the problem has a trivial linear time solution. In this paper, we study the case where each sensor coverage region is an arbitrary ray, and give an O(n2m) time algorithm for computing the barrier resilience when there are m ⩾ 1 sensor intersections.


2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (02) ◽  
pp. 2070-2078
Author(s):  
Yasushi Kawase ◽  
Hanna Sumita

We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods to risk-neutral agents in a stochastic setting. We propose an (approximation) algorithm to find a stochastic allocation that maximizes the minimum utility among the agents. The algorithm runs by repeatedly finding an (approximate) allocation to maximize the total virtual utility of the agents. This implies that the problem is solvable in polynomial time when the utilities are gross-substitutes (which is a subclass of submodular). When the utilities are submodular, we can find a (1 − 1/e)-approximate solution for the problem and this is best possible unless P=NP. We also extend the problem where a stochastic allocation must satisfy the (ex ante) envy-freeness. Under this condition, we demonstrate that the problem is NP-hard even when every agent has an additive utility with a matroid constraint (which is a subclass of gross-substitutes). Furthermore, we propose a polynomial-time algorithm for the setting with a restriction that the matroid constraint is common to all agents.


2007 ◽  
Vol Vol. 9 no. 1 (Graph and Algorithms) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Kára ◽  
Jan Kratochvil ◽  
David R. Wood

Graphs and Algorithms International audience We consider the problem of finding a balanced ordering of the vertices of a graph. More precisely, we want to minimise the sum, taken over all vertices v, of the difference between the number of neighbours to the left and right of v. This problem, which has applications in graph drawing, was recently introduced by Biedl et al. [Discrete Applied Math. 148:27―48, 2005]. They proved that the problem is solvable in polynomial time for graphs with maximum degree three, but NP-hard for graphs with maximum degree six. One of our main results is to close the gap in these results, by proving NP-hardness for graphs with maximum degree four. Furthermore, we prove that the problem remains NP-hard for planar graphs with maximum degree four and for 5-regular graphs. On the other hand, we introduce a polynomial time algorithm that determines whetherthere is a vertex ordering with total imbalance smaller than a fixed constant, and a polynomial time algorithm that determines whether a given multigraph with even degrees has an 'almost balanced' ordering.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Jessica Chen ◽  
Henry Milner ◽  
Ion Stoica ◽  
Jibin Zhan

The HTTP adaptive streaming technique opened the door to cope with the fluctuating network conditions during the streaming process by dynamically adjusting the volume of the future chunks to be downloaded. The bitrate selection in this adjustment inevitably involves the task of predicting the future throughput of a video session, owing to which various heuristic solutions have been explored. The ultimate goal of the present work is to explore the theoretical upper bounds of the QoE that any ABR algorithm can possibly reach, therefore providing an essential step to benchmarking the performance evaluation of ABR algorithms. In our setting, the QoE is defined in terms of a linear combination of the average perceptual quality and the buffering ratio. The optimization problem is proven to be NP-hard when the perceptual quality is defined by chunk size and conditions are given under which the problem becomes polynomially solvable. Enriched by a global lower bound, a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm along the dynamic programming approach is presented. When the minimum buffering is given higher priority over higher perceptual quality, the problem is shown to be also NP-hard, and the above algorithm is simplified and enhanced by a sequence of lower bounds on the completion time of chunk downloading, which, according to our experiment, brings a 36.0% performance improvement in terms of computation time. To handle large amounts of data more efficiently, a polynomial-time algorithm is also introduced to approximate the optimal values when minimum buffering is prioritized. Besides its performance guarantee, this algorithm is shown to reach 99.938% close to the optimal results, while taking only 0.024% of the computation time compared to the exact algorithm in dynamic programming.


1996 ◽  
Vol 07 (01) ◽  
pp. 23-41
Author(s):  
MARTIN FÜRER ◽  
WEBB MILLER

An alignment of k given sequences is a k-rowed matrix frequently used by molecular biologists to display correspondences between entries from each sequence. Under one approach, an alignment is represented by a matrix of ‘x’ and ’-’ characters, where each x in row r indicates the position of an entry of sequence r. It is sometimes efficient to store only the run-length encoding of each row of this bit-matrix. A natural class of commands for editing one such row into another consists of operations of the form: “Move the d dashes that begin at position i of row r to position j of that row,” for relevant values of r, d, i and j. We show that the problem of determining a shortest sequence of such operations that converts one given alignment to another is NP-hard and give a polynomial-time algorithm that always comes within a factor 5/4 of optimality. An application of these ideas to alignments of long DNA sequences is discussed.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document