English

Hardness of Minimum Barrier Shrinkage and Minimum Installation Path

Computational Complexity 2020-08-20 v3 Computational Geometry

Abstract

In the Minimum Installation Path problem, we are given a graph GG with edge weights w(.)w(.) and two vertices s,ts,t of GG. We want to assign a non-negative power p(v)p(v) to each vertex vv of GG so that the edges uvuv such that p(u)+p(v)p(u)+p(v) is at least w(uv)w(uv) contain some ss-tt-path, and minimize the sum of assigned powers. In the Minimum Barrier Shrinkage problem, we are given a family of disks in the plane and two points xx and yy lying outside the disks. The task is to shrink the disks, each one possibly by a different amount, so that we can draw an xx-yy curve that is disjoint from the interior of the shrunken disks, and the sum of the decreases in the radii is minimized. We show that the Minimum Installation Path and the Minimum Barrier Shrinkage problems (or, more precisely, the natural decision problems associated with them) are weakly NP-hard.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.04228,
  title  = {Hardness of Minimum Barrier Shrinkage and Minimum Installation Path},
  author = {Sergio Cabello and Éric Colin de Verdière},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.04228},
  year   = {2020}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:39:08.345Z