,
Michalis Xefteris
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
In this paper, we consider the k-Covering Canadian Traveller Problem (k-CCTP), which can be seen as a variant of the Travelling Salesperson Problem. The goal of k-CCTP is finding the shortest tour for a traveller to visit a set of locations in a given graph and return to the origin. Crucially, unknown to the traveller, up to k edges of the graph are blocked and the traveller only discovers blocked edges online at one of their respective endpoints. The currently best known upper bound for k-CCTP is O(√k) which was shown in [Huang and Liao, ISAAC '12]. We improve this polynomial bound to a logarithmic one by presenting a deterministic O(log k)-competitive algorithm that runs in polynomial time. Further, we demonstrate the tightness of our analysis by giving a lower bound instance for our algorithm.
@InProceedings{hahn_et_al:LIPIcs.MFCS.2023.53,
author = {Hahn, Niklas and Xefteris, Michalis},
title = {{The Covering Canadian Traveller Problem Revisited}},
booktitle = {48th International Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS 2023)},
pages = {53:1--53:12},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-292-1},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2023},
volume = {272},
editor = {Leroux, J\'{e}r\^{o}me and Lombardy, Sylvain and Peleg, David},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2023.53},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-185876},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.MFCS.2023.53},
annote = {Keywords: Online Algorithm, Canadian Traveller Problem, Travelling Salesperson Problem, Graph Exploration}
}