We consider the Travelling Salesman Problem with Neighbourhoods (TSPN) on the Euclidean plane (ℝ²) and present a Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) when the neighbourhoods are parallel line segments with lengths between [1, λ] for any constant value λ ≥ 1. In TSPN (which generalizes classic TSP), each client represents a set (or neighbourhood) of points in a metric and the goal is to find a minimum cost TSP tour that visits at least one point from each client set. In the Euclidean setting, each neighbourhood is a region on the plane. TSPN is significantly more difficult than classic TSP even in the Euclidean setting, as it captures group TSP. A notable case of TSPN is when each neighbourhood is a line segment. Although there are PTASs for when neighbourhoods are fat objects (with limited overlap), TSPN over line segments is APX-hard even if all the line segments have unit length. For parallel (unit) line segments, the best approximation factor is 3√2 from more than two decades ago. The PTAS we present in this paper settles the approximability of this case of the problem. Our algorithm finds a (1 + ε)-factor approximation for an instance of the problem for n segments with lengths in [1,λ] in time n^O(λ/ε³).
@InProceedings{ghaseminia_et_al:LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.53, author = {Ghaseminia, Benyamin and Salavatipour, Mohammad R.}, title = {{A PTAS for TSP with Neighbourhoods over Parallel Line Segments}}, booktitle = {41st International Symposium on Computational Geometry (SoCG 2025)}, pages = {53:1--53:15}, series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)}, ISBN = {978-3-95977-370-6}, ISSN = {1868-8969}, year = {2025}, volume = {332}, editor = {Aichholzer, Oswin and Wang, Haitao}, publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik}, address = {Dagstuhl, Germany}, URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.53}, URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-232058}, doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.SoCG.2025.53}, annote = {Keywords: Approximation Scheme, TSP Neighbourhood, Parallel line segments} }
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