Related papers: The Maximum Traveling Salesman Problem with Submod…
We consider the traveling salesman problem when the cities are points in R^d for some fixed d and distances are computed according to geometric distances, determined by some norm. We show that for any polyhedral norm, the problem of finding…
We study the problem of finding a tour of $n$ points in which every edge is long. More precisely, we wish to find a tour that visits every point exactly once, maximizing the length of the shortest edge in the tour. The problem is known as…
A fundamental assumption in classical mechanism design is that buyers are perfect optimizers. However, in practice, buyers may be limited by their computational capabilities or a lack of information, and may not be able to perfectly…
We study the problem of persistent monitoring of a finite number of inter-connected geographical nodes by a group of heterogeneous mobile agents. We assign to each geographical node a concave and increasing reward function that resets to…
This paper considers a Min-Max Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem (MTSP), where the goal is to find a set of tours, one for each agent, to collectively visit all the cities while minimizing the length of the longest tour. Though MTSP has…
We study the problem of maximizing a non-monotone submodular function under multiple knapsack constraints. We propose a simple discrete greedy algorithm to approach this problem, and prove that it yields strong approximation guarantees for…
The input to the unrooted traveling repairman problem is an undirected metric graph and a subset of nodes, each of which has a time window of unit length. Given that a repairman can start at any location, the goal is to plan a route that…
The $k-$traveling salesman problem ($k$-TSP) seeks a tour of minimal length that visits a subset of $k\leq n$ points. The traveling repairman problem (TRP) seeks a complete tour with minimal latency. This paper provides constant-factor…
This article presents a new search algorithm for the NP-hard problem of optimizing functions of binary variables that decompose according to a graphical model. It can be applied to models of any order and structure. The main novelty is a…
We study a robust optimal stopping problem with respect to a set $\cP$ of mutually singular probabilities. This can be interpreted as a zero-sum controller-stopper game in which the stopper is trying to maximize its pay-off while an adverse…
Motivated by the well known four-thirds conjecture for the traveling salesman problem (TSP), we study the problem of {\em uniform covers}. A graph $G=(V,E)$ has an $\alpha$-uniform cover for TSP (2EC, respectively) if the everywhere…
Motivated by a wide range of applications in data mining and machine learning, we consider the problem of maximizing a submodular function subject to supermodular cost constraints. In contrast to the well-understood setting of cardinality…
This paper proposes a novel mission planning algorithm for autonomous robots that selects an optimal waypoint sequence from a predefined set to maximize total reward while satisfying obstacle avoidance, state, input, derivative, mission…
In this paper, we consider differential approximability of the traveling salesman problem (TSP). We show that TSP is $3/4$-differential approximable, which improves the currently best known bound $3/4 -O(1/n)$ due to Escoffier and Monnot in…
The classical problem of maximizing a submodular function under a matroid constraint is considered. Defining a new measure for the increments made by the greedy algorithm at each step, called the discriminant, improved approximation ratio…
The $k$-Opt heuristic is a simple improvement heuristic for the Traveling Salesman Problem. It starts with an arbitrary tour and then repeatedly replaces $k$ edges of the tour by $k$ other edges, as long as this yields a shorter tour. We…
In this paper, we study the Orienteering Aisle-graphs Single-access Problem (OASP), a variant of the orienteering problem for a robot moving in a so-called single-access aisle-graph, i.e., a graph consisting of a set of rows that can be…
In this paper, we consider the unconstrained submodular maximization problem. We propose the first algorithm for this problem that achieves a tight $(1/2-\varepsilon)$-approximation guarantee using $\tilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-1})$ adaptive…
This paper studies the problem of maximizing a monotone submodular function under an unknown knapsack constraint. A solution to this problem is a policy that decides which item to pack next based on the past packing history. The robustness…
We consider the problem of maximizing the revenue raised from tolls set on the arcs of a transportation network, under the constraint that users are assigned to toll-compatible shortest paths. We first prove that this problem is strongly…