Gregory Gutin We introduce a new extension of Punnen’s exponential neighborhood for the traveling salesman problem (TSP). In contrast to an interesting generalization of Punnen’s neighborhood by De Franceschi, Fischetti and Toth (2005), our neighborhood is searchable in polynomial time, a feature that invites exploitation by heuristic and metaheuristic procedures for the TSP and related problems, including … Read more
Level of Repair Analysis (LORA) is a prescribed procedure for defence logistics support planning. For a complex engineering system containing perhaps thousands of assemblies, sub-assemblies, components, etc. organized into several levels of indenture and with a number of possible repair decisions, LORA seeks to determine an optimal provision of repair and maintenance facilities to minimize … Read more
A set $S$ of vertices in a digraph $D=(V,A)$ is a kernel if $S$ is independent and every vertex in $V-S$ has an out-neighbor in $S$. We show that there exist $O(n2^{19.1 \sqrt{k}}+n^4)$-time and $O(2^{19.1 \sqrt{k}} k^9 + n^2)$-time algorithms for checking whether a planar digraph $D$ of order $n$ has a kernel with at … Read more
We introduce and study the batched bin packing problem (BBPP), a bin packing problem in which items become available for packing incrementally, one batch at a time. A batched algorithm must pack a batch before the next batch becomes known. A batch may contain several items; the special case when each batch consists of merely … Read more
In the recently published book on the Traveling Salesman Problem, half of Chapter 6 is devoted to domination analysis (DA) of heuristics for the Traveling Salesman Problem. Another chapter (in preparation) is a detailed overview of the whole area of DA. Both chapters are of considerable length. The purpose of this paper is to give … Read more
Let $P$ be a combinatorial optimization problem, and let $A$ be an approximation algorithm for $P$. The domination ratio $\domr(A,s)$ is the maximal real $q$ such that the solution $x(I)$ obtained by $A$ for any instance $I$ of $P$ of size $s$ is not worse than at least the fraction $q$ of the feasible solutions … Read more
Let $P$ be an optimization problem, and let $A$ be an approximation algorithm for $P$. The domination ratio $\domr(A,n)$ is the maximum real $q$ such that the solution $x(I)$ obtained by $A$ for any instance $I$ of $P$ of size $n$ is not worse than at least a fraction $q$ of the feasible solutions of … Read more
We provide a characterization of the cases when the greedy algorithm may produce the unique worst possible solution for the problem of finding a minimum weight base in a uniform independence system when the weights are taken from a finite range. We apply this theorem to TSP and the minimum bisection problem. The practical message … Read more
We use the notion of domination ratio introduced by Glover and Punnen in 1997 to present a new classification of combinatorial optimization (CO) problems: $\DOM$-easy and $\DOM$-hard problems. It follows from results proved already in the 1970’s that {\tt min TSP} (both symmetric and asymmetric versions) is $\DOM$-easy. We prove that several CO problems are … Read more
We introduce an anti-matroid as a family $\cal F$ of subsets of a ground set $E$ for which there exists an assignment of weights to the elements of $E$ such that the greedy algorithm to compute a maximal set (with respect to inclusion) in $\cal F$ of minimum weight finds, instead, the unique maximal set … Read more