Related papers: Placing your Coins on a Shelf
A unit disk graph is the intersection graph of n congruent disks in the plane. Dominating sets in unit disk graphs are widely studied due to their application in wireless ad-hoc networks. Because the minimum dominating set problem for unit…
We consider a large family of problems in which an ordering (or, more precisely, a chain of subsets) of a finite set must be chosen to minimize some weighted sum of costs. This family includes variations of Min Sum Set Cover (MSSC), several…
How can a stack of identical blocks be arranged to extend beyond the edge of a table as far as possible? We consider a generalization of this classic puzzle to blocks that differ in width and mass. Despite the seemingly simple premise, we…
We study graph ordering problems with a min-max objective. A classical problem of this type is cutwidth, where given a graph we want to order its vertices such that the number of edges crossing any point is minimized. We give a $…
We study the online problem of assigning a moving point to a base-station region that contains it. For instance, the moving object could represent a cellular phone and the base station could represent the coverage zones of cell towers. Our…
Consider the following toy problem. There are $m$ rectangles and $n$ points on the plane. Each rectangle $R$ is a consumer with budget $B_R$, who is interested in purchasing the cheapest item (point) inside R, given that she has enough…
Two kinds of approximation algorithms exist for the k-BALANCED PARTITIONING problem: those that are fast but compute unsatisfying approximation ratios, and those that guarantee high quality ratios but are slow. In this paper we prove that…
We study approximation algorithms for the following geometric version of the maximum coverage problem: Let P be a set of n weighted points in the plane. We want to place m a * b rectangles such that the sum of the weights of the points in P…
We consider variants of the following multi-covering problem with disks. We are given two point sets $Y$ (servers) and $X$ (clients) in the plane, a coverage function $\kappa :X \rightarrow \mathcal{N}$, and a constant $\alpha \geq 1$.…
We consider the problem of assigning radii to a given set of points in the plane, such that the resulting set of circles is connected, and the sum of radii is minimized. We show that the problem is polynomially solvable if a connectivity…
We present an $n\Delta^{O(k^2)}$ time algorithm to obtain an optimal solution for $1$-dimensional cutting stock problem: the bin packing problem of packing $n$ items onto unit capacity bins under the restriction that the number of item…
We consider the problem of sorting $n$ items, given the outcomes of $m$ pre-existing comparisons. We present a simple and natural deterministic algorithm that runs in $O(m + \log T)$ time and does $O(\log T)$ comparisons, where $T$ is the…
Let $\cal R$ be a set of $n$ colored imprecise points, where each point is colored by one of $k$ colors. Each imprecise point is specified by a unit disk in which the point lies. We study the problem of computing the smallest and the…
We study the periodic assignment problem, in which a set of periodically repeating tasks must be assigned to workers within a repeating schedule. The classical efficiency objective is to minimize the number of workers required to operate…
Consider a sliding camera that travels back and forth along an orthogonal line segment $s$ inside an orthogonal polygon $P$ with $n$ vertices. The camera can see a point $p$ inside $P$ if and only if there exists a line segment containing…
The bin packing problem is to find the minimum number of bins of size one to pack a list of items with sizes $a_1,..., a_n$ in $(0,1]$. Using uniform sampling, which selects a random element from the input list each time, we develop a…
Given a graph $G = (V, E)$, the $3$-path partition problem is to find a minimum collection of vertex-disjoint paths each of order at most $3$ to cover all the vertices of $V$. It is different from but closely related to the well-known…
Given a finite family of squares in the plane, the packing problem asks for the maximum number $\nu$ of pairwise disjoint squares among them, while the hitting problem for the minimum number $\tau$ of points hitting all of them. Clearly,…
The \Problem{knapsack} problem is a fundamental problem in combinatorial optimization. It has been studied extensively from theoretical as well as practical perspectives as it is one of the most well-known NP-hard problems. The goal is to…
Given a set of points $P$ and axis-aligned rectangles $\mathcal{R}$ in the plane, a point $p \in P$ is called \emph{exposed} if it lies outside all rectangles in $\mathcal{R}$. In the \emph{max-exposure problem}, given an integer parameter…