English

Planar p-center problems are solvable in polynomial time when clustering a Pareto Front

Computational Geometry 2019-08-27 v1 Computational Complexity Discrete Mathematics Data Structures and Algorithms

Abstract

This paper is motivated by real-life applications of bi-objective optimization. Having many non dominated solutions, one wishes to cluster the Pareto front using Euclidian distances. The p-center problems, both in the discrete and continuous versions, are proven solvable in polynomial time with a common dynamic programming algorithm. Having NN points to partition in K3K\geqslant 3 clusters, the complexity is proven in O(KNlogN)O(KN\log N) (resp O(KNlog2N)O(KN\log^2 N)) time and O(KN)O(KN) memory space for the continuous (resp discrete) KK-center problem. 22-center problems have complexities in O(NlogN)O(N\log N). To speed-up the algorithm, parallelization issues are discussed. A posteriori, these results allow an application inside multi-objective heuristics to archive partial Pareto Fronts.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1908.09648,
  title  = {Planar p-center problems are solvable in polynomial time when clustering a Pareto Front},
  author = {Nicolas Dupin and Frank Nielsen and El-Ghazali Talbi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.09648},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T10:56:51.003Z