Related papers: Improved Hardness-of-Approximation for Token Swapp…
In the pairwise weighted spanner problem, the input consists of an $n$-vertex-directed graph, where each edge is assigned a cost and a length. Given $k$ vertex pairs and a distance constraint for each pair, the goal is to find a…
In the classical Node-Disjoint Paths (NDP) problem, we are given an $n$-vertex graph $G=(V,E)$, and a collection $M=\{(s_1,t_1),\ldots,(s_k,t_k)\}$ of pairs of its vertices, called source-destination, or demand pairs. The goal is to route…
It is shown in this note that approximating the number of independent sets in a $k$-uniform linear hypergraph with maximum degree at most $\Delta$ is NP-hard if $\Delta\geq 5\cdot 2^{k-1}+1$. This confirms that for the relevant sampling and…
We consider the maximum vertex-weighted matching problem (MVM) for non-bipartite graphs. In earlier work we have described a 2/3-approximation algorithm for the MVM on bipartite graphs (Dobrian, Halappanavar, Pothen and Al-Herz, SIAM J.…
We consider a recently introduced fair repetitive scheduling problem involving a set of clients, each asking for their associated job to be daily scheduled on a single machine across a finite planning horizon. The goal is to determine a job…
The problem of matching a query string to a directed graph, whose vertices are labeled by strings, has application in different fields, from data mining to computational biology. Several variants of the problem have been considered,…
Near ubiquitous mobile computing has led to intense interest in dynamic graph theory. This provides a new and challenging setting for algorithmics and complexity theory. For any graph-based problem, the rapid evolution of a (possibly…
We study the Travelling Salesman Problem (TSP) on the metric completion of cubic and subcubic graphs, which is known to be NP-hard. The problem is of interest because of its relation to the famous 4/3 conjecture for metric TSP, which says…
We study a natural generalization of the maximum weight many-to-one matching problem. We are given an undirected bipartite graph $G= (A \cup P, E)$ with weights on the edges in $E$, and with lower and upper quotas on the vertices in $P$. We…
We study the weighted $k$-Set Packing problem: Given a collection $S$ of sets, each of cardinality at most $k$, together with a positive weight function $w:\mathcal{S}\rightarrow\mathbb{Q}_{>0}$, the task is to compute a disjoint…
We study a combinatorial problem called Minimum Maximal Matching, where we are asked to find in a general graph the smallest that can not be extended. We show that this problem is hard to approximate with a constant smaller than 2, assuming…
We present a new approximation algorithm for the minimum 2-edge-connected spanning subgraph problem. Its approximation ratio is $\frac{4}{3}$, which matches the current best ratio. The approximation ratio of the algorithm is $\frac{6}{5}$…
We study the following variant of the 15 puzzle. Given a graph and two token placements on the vertices, we want to find a walk of the minimum length (if any exists) such that the sequence of token swappings along the walk obtains one of…
We consider the Stochastic Matching problem, which is motivated by applications in kidney exchange and online dating. In this problem, we are given an undirected graph. Each edge is assigned a known, independent probability of existence and…
The Geometric Bin Packing (GBP) problem is a generalization of Bin Packing where the input is a set of $d$-dimensional rectangles, and the goal is to pack them into unit $d$-dimensional cubes efficiently. It is NP-Hard to obtain a PTAS for…
We present a new generalization of the bin covering problem that is known to be a strongly NP-hard problem. In our generalization there is a positive constant $\Delta$, and we are given a set of items each of which has a positive size. We…
A mixed dominating set of a graph $G = (V, E)$ is a mixed set $D$ of vertices and edges, such that for every edge or vertex, if it is not in $D$, then it is adjacent or incident to at least one vertex or edge in $D$. The mixed domination…
$\newcommand{\eps}{\varepsilon} $We prove that for any $\eps > 0$ it is $\textsf{NP}$-hard to approximate the non-commutative Grothendieck problem to within a factor $1/2 + \eps$, which matches the approximation ratio of the algorithm of…
Most optimization problems are notoriously hard. Considerable efforts must be spent in obtaining an optimal solution to certain instances that we encounter in the real world scenarios. Often it turns out that input instances get modified…
First, we study geometric variants of the standard set cover motivated by assignment of directional antenna and shipping with deadlines, providing the first known polynomial-time exact solutions. Next, we consider the following general…