English

On the approximability and exact algorithms for vector domination and related problems in graphs

Discrete Mathematics 2015-03-17 v2 Data Structures and Algorithms Combinatorics

Abstract

We consider two graph optimization problems called vector domination and total vector domination. In vector domination one seeks a small subset S of vertices of a graph such that any vertex outside S has a prescribed number of neighbors in S. In total vector domination, the requirement is extended to all vertices of the graph. We prove that these problems (and several variants thereof) cannot be approximated to within a factor of clnn, where c is a suitable constant and n is the number of the vertices, unless P = NP. We also show that two natural greedy strategies have approximation factors ln D+O(1), where D is the maximum degree of the input graph. We also provide exact polynomial time algorithms for several classes of graphs. Our results extend, improve, and unify several results previously known in the literature.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1012.1529,
  title  = {On the approximability and exact algorithms for vector domination and related problems in graphs},
  author = {Ferdinando Cicalese and Martin Milanic and Ugo Vaccaro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1012.1529},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

In the version published in DAM, weaker lower bounds for vector domination and total vector domination were stated. Being these problems generalization of domination and total domination, the lower bounds of 0.2267 ln n and (1-epsilon) ln n clearly hold for both problems, unless P = NP or NP \subseteq DTIME(n^{O(log log n)}), respectively. The claims are corrected in the present version

R2 v1 2026-06-21T16:54:52.983Z