Computer Science

We present a prototype online system to automate the procedure of computing different types of linear layouts of graphs under different user-specific constraints. The system consists of two main components; the client and the server sides. The client side is built upon an easy-to-use editor, which supports basic interaction with graphs, enriched with several additional features to allow the user to define and further constraint the linear layout to be computed. The server side, which is available to multiple clients through a well-documented API, is responsible for the actual computation of the linear layout. Its algorithmic core is an extension of a SAT formulation that is known to be robust enough to solve non-trivial instances in reasonable amount of time. However, it has also several known limitations and potential improvements that~we address in this work (e.g., limited applicability to a particular type of linear layouts, no support for additional constraints, limited extendability e.t.c.). As a proof of concept, we present our findings for a sketch of a proof of an important result in the field that was proposed by Yannakakis back in 1986 (whose details, however, have not been published so far).

We present an n Δ O( k 2 ) time algorithm to obtain an optimal solution for 1 -dimensional cutting stock problem: the bin packing problem of packing n items onto unit capacity bins under the restriction that the number of item sizes k is fixed, where Δ is the reciprocal of the size of the smallest item. We employ elementary ideas in both the design and analysis our algorithm.

In this article, we propose a new type of square matrix associated with an undirected graph by trading off the naturally imbedded symmetry in them. The proposed matrix is defined using the neighbourhood sets of the vertices. It is called as neighbourhood matrix and it is denoted by NM(G) as this proposed matrix also exhibits a bijection between the product of the two graph matrices, namely the adjacency matrix and the graph Laplacian. This matrix can also be obtained by looking at every vertex and the subgraph with vertices from the first two levels in the level decomposition from that vertex. The two levels in the level decomposition of the graph give us more information about the neighbour of a vertex along with the neighbour of neighbour of a vertex. This insight is required and is found useful in studying the impact of broadcasting on social networks, in particular, and complex networks, in general. We establish several interesting properties of the NM(G) . In addition, we also show how to reconstruct a graph G , given a NM(G) . The proposed matrix is also found to solve many graph theoretic problems using less time complexity in comparison to the existing algorithms.

We give an explicit and effective construction for rhombus cut-and-project tilings with global n-fold rotational symmetry for any n. This construction is based on the dualization of regular n-fold multigrids. The main point is to prove the regularity of these multigrids, for this we use a result on trigonometric diophantine equations.

Hamiltonian cycles in graphs were first studied in the 1850s. Since then, an impressive amount of research has been dedicated to identifying classes of graphs that allow Hamiltonian cycles, and to related questions. The corresponding decision problem, that asks whether a given graph is Hamiltonian (i.\,e.\ admits a Hamiltonian cycle), is one of Karp's famous NP-complete problems. In this paper we study graphs of bounded degree that are \emph{far} from being Hamiltonian, where a graph G on n vertices is \emph{far} from being Hamiltonian, if modifying a constant fraction of n edges is necessary to make G Hamiltonian. We give an explicit deterministic construction of a class of graphs of bounded degree that are locally Hamiltonian, but (globally) far from being Hamiltonian. Here, \emph{locally Hamiltonian} means that every subgraph induced by the neighbourhood of a small vertex set appears in some Hamiltonian graph. More precisely, we obtain graphs which differ in Θ(n) edges from any Hamiltonian graph, but non-Hamiltonicity cannot be detected in the neighbourhood of o(n) vertices. Our class of graphs yields a class of hard instances for one-sided error property testers with linear query complexity. It is known that any property tester (even with two-sided error) requires a linear number of queries to test Hamiltonicity (Yoshida, Ito, 2010). This is proved via a randomised construction of hard instances. In contrast, our construction is deterministic. So far only very few deterministic constructions of hard instances for property testing are known. We believe that our construction may lead to future insights in graph theory and towards a characterisation of the properties hat are testable in the bounded-degree model.

We prove an inequality for the number of periods in a word x in terms of the length of x and its initial critical exponent. Next, we characterize all periods of the length-n prefix of a characteristic Sturmian word in terms of the lazy Ostrowski representation of n, and use this result to show that our inequality is tight for infinitely many words x. We propose two related measures of periodicity for infinite words. Finally, we also consider special cases where x is overlap-free or squarefree.

The operation of a system, such as a vehicle, communication network or automatic process, heavily depends on the correct operation of its components. A Stochastic Binary System (SBS) mathematically models the behavior of on-off systems, where the components are subject to probabilistic failures. Our goal is to understand the reliability of the global system. The reliability evaluation of an SBS belongs to the class of NP-Hard problems, and the combinatorics of SBS imposes several challenges. In a previous work by the same authors, a special sub-class of SBSs called "separable systems" was introduced. These systems accept an efficient representation by a linear inequality on the binary states of the components. However, the reliability evaluation of separable systems is still hard. A theoretical contribution in the understanding of separable systems is given. We fully characterize separable systems under the all-terminal reliability model, finding that they admit efficient reliability evaluation in this relevant context.

Submodularity is an important concept in combinatorial optimization, and it is often regarded as a discrete analog of convexity. It is a fundamental fact that the set of minimizers of any submodular function forms a distributive lattice. Conversely, it is also known that any finite distributive lattice is isomorphic to the minimizer set of a submodular function, through the celebrated Birkhoff's representation theorem. M ♮ -concavity is a key concept in discrete convex analysis. It is known for set functions that the class of M ♮ -concavity is a proper subclass of submodularity. Thus, the minimizer set of an M ♮ -concave function forms a distributive lattice. It is natural to ask if any finite distributive lattice appears as the minimizer set of an M ♮ -concave function. This paper affirmatively answers the question.

Given a weighted graph G(V,E) and t≥1 , a subgraph H is a \emph{ t --spanner} of G if the lengths of shortest paths in G are preserved in H up to a multiplicative factor of t . The \emph{subsetwise spanner} problem aims to preserve distances in G for only a subset of the vertices. We generalize the minimum-cost subsetwise spanner problem to one where vertices appear on multiple levels, which we call the \emph{multi-level graph spanner} (MLGS) problem, and describe two simple heuristics. Applications of this problem include road/network building and multi-level graph visualization, especially where vertices may require different grades of service. We formulate a 0--1 integer linear program (ILP) of size O(|E||V | 2 ) for the more general minimum \emph{pairwise spanner problem}, which resolves an open question by Sigurd and Zachariasen on whether this problem admits a useful polynomial-size ILP. We extend this ILP formulation to the MLGS problem, and evaluate the heuristic and ILP performance on random graphs of up to 100 vertices and 500 edges.

The Double Travelling Salesman Problem with Multiple Stacks, DTSPMS, deals with the collect and delivery of n commodities in two distinct cities, where the pickup and the delivery tours are related by LIFO constraints. During the pickup tour, commodities are loaded into a container of k rows, or stacks, with capacity c. This paper focuses on computational aspects of the DTSPMS, which is NP-hard. We first review the complexity of two critical subproblems: deciding whether a given pair of pickup and delivery tours is feasible and, given a loading plan, finding an optimal pair of pickup and delivery tours, are both polynomial under some conditions on k and c. We then prove a (3k)/2 standard approximation for the MinMetrickDTSPMS, where k is a universal constant, and other approximation results for various versions of the problem. We finally present a matching-based heuristic for the 2DTSPMS, which is a special case with k=2 rows, when the distances are symmetric. This yields a 1/2-o(1), 3/4-o(1) and 3/2+o(1) standard approximation for respectively Max2DTSPMS, its restriction Max2DTSPMS-(1,2) with distances 1 and 2, and Min2DTSPMS-(1,2), and a 1/2-o(1) differential approximation for Min2DTSPMS and Max2DTSPMS.