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Clearing Connections by Few Agents

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Author

Summary, in English

We study the problem of clearing connections by agents placed at some vertices in a directed graph. The agents can move only along directed paths. The objective is to minimize the number of agents guaranteeing that any pair of vertices can be connected by a underlying undirected path that can be cleared by the agents. We provide several results on the hardness, approximability and parameterized complexity of the problem. In particular, we show it to be: NP-hard, 2-approximable in polynomial-time, and solvable exactly in O(alpha n(3)2(2 alpha)) time, where a is the number of agents in the solution. In addition, we give a simple linear-time algorithm optimally solving the problem in digraphs whose underlying graphs are trees. Finally, we discuss a related problem, where the task is to clear with a minimum number of agents a subgraph of the underlying graph containing its spanning tree. We show that this problem also admits a 2-approximation in polynomial time.

Department/s

Publishing year

2014

Language

English

Pages

289-300

Publication/Series

Fun with Algorithms/Lecture notes in computer science

Volume

8496

Document type

Conference paper

Publisher

Springer

Topic

  • Medicinal Chemistry

Keywords

  • clearing paths
  • NP-hardness
  • approximation
  • parametrized complexity

Conference name

7th International Conference on Fun with Algorithms

Conference date

2014-07-01 - 2014-07-03

Status

Published

Research group

  • Clinical Chemistry, Malmö

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISSN: 1611-3349
  • ISSN: 0302-9743
  • ISBN: 978-3-319-07890-8