Abstract
The problem of covering minimum cost common bases of two matroids is NP-complete, even if the two matroids coincide, and the costs are all equal to 1. In this paper we show that the following special case is solvable in polynomial time: given a digraph \(D=(V,A)\) with a designated root node \(r\in V\) and arc-costs \(c:A\rightarrow \mathbb {R}\), find a minimum cardinality subset H of the arc set A such that H intersects every minimum c-cost r-arborescence. By an r-arborescence we mean a spanning arborescence of root r. The algorithm we give solves a weighted version as well, in which a nonnegative weight function \(w:A\rightarrow \mathbb {R}_+\) (unrelated to c) is also given, and we want to find a subset H of the arc set such that H intersects every minimum c-cost r-arborescence, and \(w(H)=\sum _{a\in H}w(a)\) is minimum. The running time of the algorithm is \(O(n^3T(n,m))\), where n and m denote the number of nodes and arcs of the input digraph, and T(n, m) is the time needed for a minimum \(s-t\) cut computation in this digraph. A polyhedral description is not given, and seems rather challenging.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Naoyuki Kamiyama for calling our attention to this problem at the 7th Hungarian–Japanese Symposium on Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications in Kyoto. We would like to thank Kristóf Bérczi, András Frank, Erika Kovács, Tamás Király and Zoltán Király of the Egerváry Research Group for useful discussions and remarks. A version of this paper was presented at the 21st International Symposium on Mathematical Programming (ISMP 2012) and at the 16th Conference on Integer Programming and Combinatorial Optimization (IPCO 2013).
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A. Bernáth: Research supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA, Grant Numbers NK105645 and K109240), and by the ERC StG Project PAAl No. 259515. Part of the research was done while the author was at Warsaw University, Institute of Informatics, ul. Banacha 2, 02-097 Warsaw, Poland.
G. Pap: Supported by the Hungarian Scientific Research Fund (OTKA, Grant Number K109240).
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Bernáth, A., Pap, G. Blocking optimal arborescences. Math. Program. 161, 583–601 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10107-016-1025-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10107-016-1025-3