Paper by Erik D. Demaine

Reference:

Takehiro Ito, Erik D. Demaine, Xiao Zhou, and Takao Nishizeki, “Approximability for Partitioning Graphs with Supply and Demand”, in Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2006), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 4288, Calcutta, India, December 18–20, 2006, pages 121–130.

Abstract:

Suppose that each vertex of a graph G is either a supply vertex or a demand vertex and is assigned a positive real number, called the supply or the demand. Each demand vertex can receive “power” from at most one supply vertex through edges in G. One thus wishes to partition G into connected components so that each component C either has no supply vertex or has exactly one supply vertex whose supply is at least the sum of demands in C, and wishes to maximize the fulfillment, that is, the sum of demands in all components with supply vertices. This maximization problem is known to be NP-hard even for trees having exactly one supply vertex and strongly NP-hard for general graphs. In this paper, we focus on the approximability of the problem. We first show that the problem is MAXSNP-hard and hence there is no polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for general graphs unless P = NP. We then present a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for series-parallel graphs having exactly one supply vertex. The FPTAS can be easily extended for partial k-trees, that is, graphs with bounded treewidth.

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