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Computing nonsimple polygons of minimum perimeter

  • Sándor P. Fekete
  • , Andreas Haas
  • , Michael Hemmer
  • , Michael Hoffmann
  • , Irina Kostitsyna
  • , Dominik Krupke
  • , Florian Maurer
  • , Joseph S.B. Mitchell
  • , Arne Schmidt
  • , Christiane Schmidt
  • , Julian Troegel
  • Technical University of Braunschweig
  • Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich
  • Eindhoven University of Technology
  • Linköping University

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

We provide exact and approximation methods for solving a geometric relaxation of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) that occurs in curve reconstruction: for a given set of vertices in the plane, the problem Minimum Perimeter Polygon (MPP) asks for a (not necessarily simply connected) polygon with shortest possible boundary length. Even though the closely related problem of finding a minimum cycle cover is polynomially solvable by matching techniques, we prove how the topological structure of a polygon leads to NP-hardness of the MPP. On the positive side, we show how to achieve a constant-factor approximation. When trying to solve MPP instances to provable optimality by means of integer programming, an additional difficulty compared to the TSP is the fact that only a subset of subtour constraints is valid, depending not on combinatorics, but on geometry. We overcome this difficulty by establishing and exploiting additional geometric properties. This allows us to reliably solve a wide range of benchmark instances with up to 600 vertices within reasonable time on a standard machine. We also show that using a natural geometry-based sparsification yields results that are on average within 0.5% of the optimum.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationExperimental Algorithms - 15th International Symposium, SEA 2016, Proceedings
EditorsAlexander S. Kulikov, Andrew V. Goldberg
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages134-149
Number of pages16
ISBN (Print)9783319388502
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016
Event15th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms, SEA 2016 - St. Petersburg, Russian Federation
Duration: Jun 5 2016Jun 8 2016

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9685
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference15th International Symposium on Experimental Algorithms, SEA 2016
Country/TerritoryRussian Federation
CitySt. Petersburg
Period06/5/1606/8/16

Keywords

  • Computational geometry meets combinatorial Optimization
  • Curve reconstruction
  • Exact optimization
  • Integer programming
  • Minimum Perimeter Polygon (MPP)
  • NP-hardness
  • Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP)

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