Mittagsseminar (in cooperation with J. Lengler, A. Steger, and D. Steurer)

Date and Time: Thursday, December 10, 2015, 12:15 pm

Duration: 30 minutes

Location: OAT S15/S16/S17

Speaker: Rico Zenklusen (IFOR)

An O(1)-Approximation for Minimum Spanning Tree Interdiction

Network interdiction studies the maximum impact that the removal of a limited number of edges or vertices can have on a graph optimization problem. Most interdiction problems are NP-hard, and only little is known about their approximability. One of the oldest and most-studied interdiction problems is minimum spanning tree (MST) interdiction. Here, an MST problem is given together with positive edge costs and a budget B. The goal is to remove edges of total cost at most B such that an MST in the resulting graph is as heavy as possible. So far, the best approximation algorithm, presented by Frederickson and Solis-Oba (SODA 1996), achieves a factor of O(log(m)). We show that MST interdiction admits an O(1)-approximation. Moreover, this implies an O(1)-approximation for a natural interdiction version of the symmetric traveling salesman problem and the path version thereof.

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