English

Burning graphs through farthest-first traversal

Data Structures and Algorithms 2022-03-21 v4 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

The graph burning problem is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem that helps quantify the vulnerability of a graph to contagion. This paper introduces a simple farthest-first traversal-based approximation algorithm for this problem over general graphs. We refer to this proposal as the Burning Farthest-First (BFF) algorithm. BFF runs in O(n3)O(n^3) steps and has an approximation factor of 32/b(G)3-2/b(G), where b(G)b(G) is the size of an optimal solution. Despite its simplicity, BFF tends to generate near-optimal solutions when tested over some benchmark datasets; in fact, it returns similar solutions to those returned by much more elaborated heuristics from the literature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2011.15019,
  title  = {Burning graphs through farthest-first traversal},
  author = {Jesús García Díaz and Julio César Pérez Sansalvador and Lil María Xibai Rodríguez Henríquez and José Alejandro Cornejo Acosta},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2011.15019},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T20:36:35.967Z