The NP-Hardness of Covering Points with Lines, Paths and Tours and Their Tractability with FPT-Algorithms
The NP-Hardness of Covering Points with Lines, Paths and Tours and their Tractability with FPT-Algorithms Author Heednacram, Apichat Published 2010 Thesis Type Thesis (PhD Doctorate) School School of Information and Communication Technology DOI https://doi.org/10.25904/1912/1694 Copyright Statement The author owns the copyright in this thesis, unless stated otherwise. Downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10072/367754 Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au The NP-Hardness of Covering Points with Lines, Paths and Tours and their Tractability with FPT-Algorithms by Apichat Heednacram B. Eng. (1st Class Hons), Griffith University, 2001 Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Institute for Integrated and Intelligent Systems Science, Environment, Engineering and Technology Griffith University March 2010 i Abstract Given a problem for which no polynomial-time algorithm is likely to exist, we investigate how to attack this seemingly intractable problem based on parame- terized complexity theory. We study hard geometric problems, and show that they are fixed-parameter tractable (FPT) given an instance and a parameter k. This allows the problems to be solved exactly, rather than approximately, in polynomial time in the size of the input and exponential time in the parameter. Although the parameterized approach is still young, in recent years, there have been many results published concerning graph problems and databases. However, not many earlier results apply the parameterized approach in the field of computational geometry. This thesis, therefore, focuses on geometric NP-hard problems. These problems are the Line Cover problem, the Rectilinear Line Cover problem in higher dimensions, the Rectilinear Minimum-Links Spanning Path problem in higher dimensions, the Rectilinear Hyper- plane Cover problem, the Minimum-Bends Traveling Salesman Prob- lem and the Rectilinear Minimum-Bends Traveling Salesman Prob- lem, in addition to some other variants of these problems.
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