Small Approximate Pareto Sets for Bi-objective Shortest Paths and Other Problems

  • Authors:
  • Ilias Diakonikolas;Mihalis Yannakakis

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA;Department of Computer Science, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA

  • Venue:
  • APPROX '07/RANDOM '07 Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Approximation and the 11th International Workshop on Randomization, and Combinatorial Optimization. Algorithms and Techniques
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

We investigate the problem of computing a minimum set of solutions that approximates within a specified accuracy 茂戮驴the Pareto curve of a multiobjective optimization problem. We show that for a broad class of bi-objective problems (containing many important widely studied problems such as shortest paths, spanning tree, and many others), we can compute in polynomial time an 茂戮驴-Pareto set that contains at most twice as many solutions as the minimum such set. Furthermore we show that the factor of 2 is tight for these problems, i.e., it is NP-hard to do better. We present further results for three or more objectives, as well as for the dual problem of computing a specified number kof solutions which provide a good approximation to the Pareto curve.