,
Yuni Iwamasa
,
Yasuaki Kobayashi
,
Yuto Okada
,
Rin Saito
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
Given a graph G and two spanning trees T and T' in G, normalSpanning Tree Reconfiguration asks whether there is a step-by-step transformation from T to T' such that all intermediates are also spanning trees of G, by exchanging an edge in T with an edge outside T at a single step. This problem is naturally related to matroid theory, which shows that there always exists such a transformation for any pair of T and T'. Motivated by this example, we study the problem of transforming a sequence of spanning trees into another sequence of spanning trees. We formulate this problem in the language of matroid theory: Given two sequences of bases of matroids, the goal is to decide whether there is a transformation between these sequences. We design a polynomial-time algorithm for this problem, even if the matroids are given as basis oracles. To complement this algorithmic result, we show that the problem of finding a shortest transformation is NP-hard to approximate within a factor of c log n for some constant c > 0, where n is the total size of the ground sets of the input matroids.
@InProceedings{hanaka_et_al:LIPIcs.ISAAC.2024.38,
author = {Hanaka, Tesshu and Iwamasa, Yuni and Kobayashi, Yasuaki and Okada, Yuto and Saito, Rin},
title = {{Basis Sequence Reconfiguration in the Union of Matroids}},
booktitle = {35th International Symposium on Algorithms and Computation (ISAAC 2024)},
pages = {38:1--38:16},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-354-6},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2024},
volume = {322},
editor = {Mestre, Juli\'{a}n and Wirth, Anthony},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2024.38},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-221658},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ISAAC.2024.38},
annote = {Keywords: Combinatorial reconfiguration, Matroids, Polynomial-time algorithm, Inapproximability}
}