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Integer programs with a constant number of constraints are solvable in pseudo-polynomial time. We give a new algorithm with a better pseudo-polynomial running time than previous results. Moreover, we establish a strong connection to the problem (min, +)-convolution. (min, +)-convolution has a trivial quadratic time algorithm and it has been conjectured that this cannot be improved significantly. We show that further improvements to our pseudo-polynomial algorithm for any fixed number of constraints are equivalent to improvements for (min, +)-convolution. This is a strong evidence that our algorithm's running time is the best possible. We also present a faster specialized algorithm for testing feasibility of an integer program with few constraints and for this we also give a tight lower bound, which is based on the SETH.
@InProceedings{jansen_et_al:LIPIcs.ITCS.2019.43,
author = {Jansen, Klaus and Rohwedder, Lars},
title = {{On Integer Programming and Convolution}},
booktitle = {10th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2019)},
pages = {43:1--43:17},
series = {Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
ISBN = {978-3-95977-095-8},
ISSN = {1868-8969},
year = {2019},
volume = {124},
editor = {Blum, Avrim},
publisher = {Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
address = {Dagstuhl, Germany},
URL = {https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2019.43},
URN = {urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-101365},
doi = {10.4230/LIPIcs.ITCS.2019.43},
annote = {Keywords: Integer programming, convolution, dynamic programming, SETH}
}