We study the d-dimensional hypercube knapsack problem ({d}-D Hc-Knapsack) where we are given a set of d-dimensional hypercubes with associated profits, and a knapsack which is a unit d-dimensional hypercube. The goal is to find an axis-aligned non-overlapping packing of a subset of hypercubes such that the profit of the packed hypercubes is maximized. For this problem, Harren (ICALP'06) gave an algorithm with an approximation ratio of (1+1/2^d+ε). For d = 2, Jansen and Solis-Oba (IPCO'08) showed that the problem admits a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS); Heydrich and Wiese (SODA'17) further improved the running time and gave an efficient polynomial-time approximation scheme (EPTAS). Both the results use structural properties of 2-D packing, which do not generalize to higher dimensions. For d > 2, it remains open to obtain a PTAS, and in fact, there has been no improvement since Harren’s result. We settle the problem by providing a PTAS. Our main technical contribution is a structural lemma which shows that any packing of hypercubes can be converted into another structured packing such that a high profitable subset of hypercubes is packed into a constant number of special hypercuboids, called 𝒱-Boxes and 𝒩-Boxes. As a side result, we give an almost optimal algorithm for a variant of the strip packing problem in higher dimensions. This might have applications for other multidimensional geometric packing problems.
@InProceedings{jansen_et_al:LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.78, author = {Jansen, Klaus and Khan, Arindam and Lira, Marvin and Sreenivas, K. V. N.}, title = {{A PTAS for Packing Hypercubes into a Knapsack}}, booktitle = {49th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2022)}, pages = {78:1--78:20}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-235-8}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2022}, volume = {229}, editor = {Boja\'{n}czyk, Miko{\l}aj and Merelli, Emanuela and Woodruff, David P.}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.78}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-164192}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2022.78}, annote = {Keywords: Multidimensional knapsack, geometric packing, cube packing, strip packing} }
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