Long Non-crossing Configurations in the Plane

Abstract

We revisit several maximization problems for geometric networks design
under the non-crossing constraint, first studied by Alon, Rajagopalan
and Suri (ACM Symposium on Computational Geometry, 1993).
Given a set of $n$ points in the plane in general position (no three points collinear), compute a longest non-crossing configuration composed of straight line segments that is: (a) a matching  (b) a Hamiltonian path (c) a spanning tree. Here we obtain new results for (b) and (c), as well as for the Hamiltonian cycle problem:

(i)  For the longest non-crossing Hamiltonian path problem,
we give an approximation algorithm with ratio $\frac{2}{\pi+1} \approx 0.4829$. The previous best ratio, due to Alon et al., was $1/\pi \approx 0.3183$. Moreover, the ratio of our algorithm is close to $2/\pi$ on a relatively broad class of instances: for point sets whose perimeter (or diameter) is much shorter than the maximum length matching. The algorithm runs in $O(n^{7/3}\log{n})$ time.

(ii) For the longest non-crossing spanning tree problem, we give an
approximation algorithm with ratio $0.502$ which runs in $O(n \log{n})$  time. The previous ratio, $1/2$, due to Alon et al., was achieved by a quadratic time algorithm. Along the way, we first re-derive the result of Alon et al. with a faster $O(n \log{n})$-time algorithm and a very simple analysis.

(iii) For the longest non-crossing Hamiltonian cycle problem,
we give an approximation algorithm whose ratio is close to $2/\pi$ on a relatively broad class of instances: for point sets with the product
$\bf{\langle}$~diameter~$\times$ ~convex hull size $\bf{\rangle}$ much smaller than the maximum length matching. The algorithm runs in
$O(n^{7/3}\log{n})$ time. No previous approximation results
were known for this problem.