Exact Algorithms and APX-Hardness Results for Geometric Packing and Covering Problems∗
Exact Algorithms and APX-Hardness Results for Geometric Packing and Covering Problems∗ Timothy M. Chan† Elyot Grant‡ March 29, 2012 Abstract We study several geometric set cover and set packing problems involv- ing configurations of points and geometric objects in Euclidean space. We show that it is APX-hard to compute a minimum cover of a set of points in the plane by a family of axis-aligned fat rectangles, even when each rectangle is an ǫ-perturbed copy of a single unit square. We extend this result to several other classes of objects including almost-circular ellipses, axis-aligned slabs, downward shadows of line segments, downward shad- ows of graphs of cubic functions, fat semi-infinite wedges, 3-dimensional unit balls, and axis-aligned cubes, as well as some related hitting set prob- lems. We also prove the APX-hardness of a related family of discrete set packing problems. Our hardness results are all proven by encoding a highly structured minimum vertex cover problem which we believe may be of independent interest. In contrast, we give a polynomial-time dynamic programming algo- rithm for geometric set cover where the objects are pseudodisks containing the origin or are downward shadows of pairwise 2-intersecting x-monotone curves. Our algorithm extends to the weighted case where a minimum-cost cover is required. We give similar algorithms for several related hitting set and discrete packing problems. 1 Introduction In a geometric set cover problem, we are given a range space (X, )—a universe X of points in Euclidean space and a pre-specified configurationS of regions or geometric objects such as rectangles or half-planes.
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