离散数学

The Ring Loading Problem emerged in the 1990s to model an important special case of telecommunication networks (SONET rings) which gained attention from practitioners and theorists alike. Given an undirected cycle on $n$ nodes together with…

The eternal vertex cover problem is a variant of the classical vertex cover problem where a set of guards on the vertices have to be dynamically reconfigured from one vertex cover to another in every round of an attacker-defender game. The…

A vertex set $D$ in a finite undirected graph $G$ is an efficient dominating set (e.d.s. for short) of $G$ if every vertex of $G$ is dominated by exactly one vertex of $D$. The Efficient Domination (ED) problem, which asks for the existence…

In the weighted partial vertex cover problem (WPVC), we are given a graph $G=(V,E)$, cost function $c:V\rightarrow N$, profit function $p:E\rightarrow N$, and positive integers $R$ and $L$. The goal is to check whether there is a subset…

In the Maximum Connectivity Improvement (MCI) problem, we are given a directed graph $G=(V,E)$ and an integer $B$ and we are asked to find $B$ new edges to be added to $G$ in order to maximize the number of connected pairs of vertices in…

The min-cost matching problem suffers from being very sensitive to small changes of the input. Even in a simple setting, e.g., when the costs come from the metric on the line, adding two nodes to the input might change the optimal solution…

We consider a variation on a classical avoidance problem from combinatorics on words that has been introduced by Mousavi and Shallit at DLT 2013. Let $\texttt{pexp}_i(w)$ be the supremum of the exponent over the products of $i$ factors of…

Perfect phylogenies are fundamental in the study of evolutionary trees because they capture the situation when each evolutionary trait emerges only once in history; if such events are believed to be rare, then by Occam's Razor such…

In this paper, we investigate the $k$-path coloring problem, a variant of vertex coloring arising in the context of integrated circuit manufacturing. In this setting, typical industrial instances exhibit a `tree-like' structure. We exploit…

In this paper, we propose an architecture of oritatami systems with which one can simulate an arbitrary nondeterministic finite automaton (NFA) in a unified manner. The oritatami system is known to be Turing-universal but the simulation…

Based on Gandy's principles for models of computation we give category-theoretic axioms describing locally deterministic updates to finite objects. Rather than fixing a particular category of states, we describe what properties such a…

This paper studies assortment and pricing optimization problems under the Two-Stage Luce model (2SLM), a discrete choice model introduced by Echenique and Saito (2018) that generalizes the multinomial logit model (MNL). The model employs an…

Consider two robots that start at the origin of the infinite line in search of an exit at an unknown location on the line. The robots can only communicate if they arrive at the same location at exactly the same time, i.e. they use the…

A hole is an induced cycle with at least four vertices. A hole is even if its number of vertices is even. Given a set L of graphs, a graph G is L-free if G does not contain any graph in L as an induced subgraph. Currently, the following two…

The Weisfeiler-Leman (WL) dimension of a graph is a measure for the inherent descriptive complexity of the graph. While originally derived from a combinatorial graph isomorphism test called the Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm, the WL dimension…

The Known Menger's theorem states that in a finite graph, the size of a minimum separator set of any pair of vertices is equal to the maximum number of disjoint paths that can be found between these two vertices. In this paper, we study the…

Consensus problems for strings and sequences appear in numerous application contexts, ranging from bioinformatics over data mining to machine learning. Closing some gaps in the literature, we show that several fundamental problems in this…

Let $G=(V,E)$ be a finite undirected graph without loops and multiple edges. A subset $M \subseteq E$ of edges is a {\em dominating induced matching} ({\em d.i.m.}) in $G$ if every edge in $E$ is intersected by exactly one edge of $M$. In…

The $k$-dimensional Weisfeiler-Leman algorithm ($k$-WL) is a fruitful approach to the Graph Isomorphism problem. 2-WL corresponds to the original algorithm suggested by Weisfeiler and Leman over 50 years ago. 1-WL is the classical color…

A transitive graph is 2-dimensional if it can be represented as the intersection of two linear orders. Such representations make answering of reachability queries trivial, and allow many problems that are NP-hard on arbitrary graphs to be…