English

A PTAS for the Min-Max Euclidean Multiple TSP

Data Structures and Algorithms 2021-12-15 v2

Abstract

We present a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for the min-max multiple TSP problem in Euclidean space, where multiple traveling salesmen are tasked with visiting a set of nn points and the objective is to minimize the maximum tour length. For an arbitrary ε>0\varepsilon > 0, our PTAS achieves a (1+ε)(1 + \varepsilon)-approximation in time O(n((1/ε)log(n/ε))O(1/ε))O \big(n ((1/\varepsilon) \log (n/\varepsilon))^{O(1/\varepsilon)} \big). Our approach extends Sanjeev Arora's dynamic-programming (DP) PTAS for the Euclidean TSP (https://doi.org/10.1145/290179.290180). Our algorithm introduces a rounding process to balance the allocation of path lengths among the multiple salesman. We analyze the accumulation of error in the DP to prove that the solution is a (1+ε)(1 + \varepsilon)-approximation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2112.04325,
  title  = {A PTAS for the Min-Max Euclidean Multiple TSP},
  author = {Mary Monroe and David M. Mount},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2112.04325},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

12 pages, 5 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:09:07.331Z