Abstract. 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 that the integrality gap, i.e., the worst case ratio between the optimal values of the TSP and its linear programming relaxation, is 4/3. Using polyhedral techniques in an interesting way, we obtain a polynomial-time 4/3-approximation algorithm for this problem on cubic graphs, improving upon Christofides' 3/2-approximation, and upon the 3/2 − 5/389 ≈ 1.487-approximation ratio by Gamarnik, Lewenstein and Svirdenko for the case the graphs are also 3-edge connected. We also prove that, as an upper bound, the 4/3 conjecture is true for this problem on cubic graphs. For subcubic graphs we obtain a polynomial-time 7/5-approximation algorithm and a 7/5 bound on the integrality gap.
Abstract. In the minimum latency problem (MLP) we are given n points v1, . . . , vn and a distance d(vi, vj) between any pair of points. We have to find a tour, starting at v1 and visiting all points, for which the sum of arrival times is minimal. The arrival time at a point vi is the traveled distance from v1 to vi in the tour. The minimum latency problem is MAX-SNP-hard for general metric spaces, but the complexity for the problem where the metric is given by an edge-weighted tree has been a long-standing open problem. We show that the minimum latency problem is NP-hard for trees even with weights in {0, 1}.
We study the traveling 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 that the integrality gap, i.e., the worst case ratio between the optimal value of a TSP instance and that of its linear programming relaxation (the subtour elimination relaxation), is 4/3. We present the first algorithm for cubic graphs with approximation ratio 4/3. The proof uses polyhedral techniques in a surprising way, which is of independent interest. In fact we prove constructively that for any cubic graph on n vertices a tour of length 4n/3 − 2 exists, which also implies the 4/3-conjecture, as an upper bound, that gives a 1.461-approximation for graph-TSP on general graphs and as a side result a 4/3-approximation algorithm for this problem on subcubic graphs, also settling the 4/3-conjecture for this class of graph-TSP. The algorithm by Mömke and Svensson is initially randomized but the authors remark that derandomization is trivial. We will present a different way to derandomize their algorithm which leads to a faster running time. All of the latter also works for multigraphs.
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