Monday, September 24 |
07:00 - 08:45 |
Breakfast ↓ Breakfast is served daily between 7 and 9am in the Vistas Dining Room, the top floor of the Sally Borden Building. (Vistas Dining Room) |
08:45 - 09:00 |
Introduction and Welcome by BIRS Staff ↓ A brief introduction to BIRS with important logistical information, technology instruction, and opportunity for participants to ask questions. (TCPL 201) |
09:00 - 10:15 |
Jakub Tarnawski: A constant-factor approximation algorithm for the Asymmetric Traveling Salesman Problem (TCPL 201) |
10:15 - 10:45 |
Coffee Break (TCPL Foyer) |
10:45 - 11:45 |
Bill Cook: Open problems on TSP computation ↓ We discuss a number of open research topics surrounding the computation of exact and approximation solutions to large-scale instances of the TSP. (TCPL 201) |
11:45 - 13:00 |
Lunch ↓ Lunch is served daily between 11:30am and 1:30pm in the Vistas Dining Room, the top floor of the Sally Borden Building. (Vistas Dining Room) |
13:00 - 14:00 |
Guided Tour of The Banff Centre ↓ Meet in the Corbett Hall Lounge for a guided tour of The Banff Centre campus. (Corbett Hall Lounge (CH 2110)) |
14:00 - 14:20 |
Group Photo ↓ Meet in foyer of TCPL to participate in the BIRS group photo. The photograph will be taken outdoors, so dress appropriately for the weather. Please don't be late, or you might not be in the official group photo! (TCPL 201) |
15:00 - 15:30 |
Coffee Break (TCPL Foyer) |
15:30 - 16:00 |
Kent Quanrud: Approximating metric TSP and approximating the Held-Karp LP ↓ Let G be an undirected graph with m edges and let ϵ>0 be a constant, and consider
the Metric-TSP instance induced by the shortest path metric on G. First, we
give an algorithm that computes, in O(m/ϵ2) randomized time and with
high probability, a (1+ϵ)-approximation for an LP relaxation of
Metric-TSP which is equivalent to the Held-Karp bound [Held and Karp, 1970].
Second, we describe an algorithm that computes, in O(m/ϵ2+n1.5/ϵ3) randomized time and with high probability, a tour of G with
cost at most (3+ϵ)/2 times the minimum cost tour of G. The second
algorithm uses the LP solution from the first algorithm as a starting point.
(Joint work with Chandra Chekuri.) (TCPL 201) |
16:00 - 16:30 |
Viswanath Nagarajan: Stochastic k-TSP ↓ We study the stochastic version of the k-Traveling Salesman
Problem. Given a metric with independent random rewards at vertices, the
objective is to minimize the expected length of a tour that collects total
reward at least k. We consider both adaptive and non-adaptive solutions: an
adaptive tour depends on observed rewards. We provide an O(logk)
approximate adaptive solution and O(log2k) approximate non-adaptive
solution, which also upper bounds the "adaptivity gap". Time permitting, we
will also discuss the setting with more general reward functions. (TCPL 201) |
16:30 - 17:00 |
Stephan Held: Vehicle routing with subtours ↓ When delivering items to a set of destinations, one can save time and cost
by passing a subset to a sub-contractor at any point en route.
We consider a model where a set of items
are initially loaded in one vehicle and should be distributed before a
given deadline T.
In addition to travel time and time for deliveries, we assume that there
is a fixed delay for handing
over an item from one vehicle to another.
We will show that it is easy to decide whether an instance is
feasible, i.e., whether it is possible to deliver all items before
the deadline T. We then consider computing a feasible tour of
minimum cost, where we incur a cost per unit distance traveled by the
vehicles, and a setup cost for every used vehicle.
Our problem arises in practical applications and generalizes classical
problems such as
shallow-light trees and the bounded-latency problem.
Our main result is a polynomial-time algorithm that, for
any given α>0 and any feasible instance, computes a solution
that delivers all items before time (1+α)T and has
cost O(1+1/α) OPT, where OPT is the minimum cost of any feasible solution.
(Joint work with Jochen Konemann and Jens Vygen. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1801.04991) (TCPL 201) |
17:00 - 17:30 |
Zachary Friggstad: Compact, provably-good LPs for orienteering and regret-bounded vehicle routing ↓ We develop polynomial-size LP-relaxations for orienteering and the
regret-bounded vehicle routing problem (RVRP) and devise suitable LP-rounding
algorithms that lead to various new insights and approximation results for these
problems. In orienteering, the goal is to find a maximum-reward r-rooted path,
possibly ending at a specified node, of length at most some given budget B. In
RVRP, the goal is to find the minimum number of r-rooted paths of regret at most
a given bound R that cover all nodes, where the regret of an r-v path is the difference between its
length and the {distance of v from r}.
For orienteering without a specified end-node, we introduce a natural bidirected
LP-relaxation and obtain a simple 3-approximation algorithm via LP-rounding.
This is the first LP-based guarantee for this problem. We also show that
point-to-point orienteering (where the end-node is also specified) can be
reduced to a regret-version of rooted orienteering at the expense of a factor-2
loss in approximation, and present an LP-relaxation with an integrality gap of 6
for this problem. For RVRP, we propose two compact LPs that lead to significant
improvements, in both approximation ratio and running time, over the previous
O(1)-factor approximation algorithm. One of these LPs is a rather unconventional
formulation that leverages various structural properties of an RVRP-solution.
(Joint work with Chaitanya Swamy.) (TCPL 201) |
17:30 - 19:30 |
Dinner ↓ A buffet dinner is served daily between 5:30pm and 7:30pm in the Vistas Dining Room, the top floor of the Sally Borden Building. (Vistas Dining Room) |