מושגי ליבה
This paper presents the first approximation schemes for the deadline Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) on metrics with bounded doubling dimension, which includes Euclidean metrics of fixed dimension. The authors also provide quasi-polynomial time approximation schemes for the k-stroll and point-to-point (P2P) orienteering problems on such metrics.
תקציר
The paper studies fundamental variants of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) in which the goal is to visit as many customers as possible before their required service deadlines.
The key results are:
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For graphs with bounded treewidth, the authors present an exact algorithm for solving the k-stroll and P2P orienteering problems, and use this to obtain a quasi-polynomial time approximation scheme (QPTAS) for deadline TSP on such graphs when the distances and deadlines are integers.
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For metrics with bounded doubling dimension (which includes Euclidean metrics of fixed dimension):
- They provide a QPTAS for the k-stroll problem.
- They use this to obtain a QPTAS for the P2P orienteering problem.
- Building on these results, they present the first approximation scheme for the deadline TSP problem on such metrics, when the distances and deadlines are integers.
- The algorithm can also be adapted to obtain a bicriteria (1+ε, 1+ε)-approximation for deadline TSP when the distances (and deadlines) are in Q+.
The key technical ideas include:
- Exploiting the structure of bounded treewidth graphs to design dynamic programming algorithms.
- Leveraging the hierarchical decomposition of doubling metrics to obtain quasi-polynomial time approximation schemes.
- Carefully bounding the excess of paths to enable approximation schemes for deadline TSP.