Partitioning a Weighted Tree into Subtrees with Weights in a Given Range

Assume that each vertex of a graph G is assigned a nonnegative integer weight and that l and u are given integers such that 0≤l≤u. One wishes to partition G into connected components by deleting edges from G so that the total weight of each component is at least l and at most u. Such a partition is called an (l,u)-partition. We deal with three problems to find an (l,u)-partition of a given graph: the minimum partition problem is to find an (l,u)-partition with the minimum number of components; the maximum partition problem is defined analogously; and the p-partition problem is to find an (l,u)-partition with a given number p of components. All these problems are NP-hard even for series-parallel graphs, but are solvable in linear time for paths. In this paper, we present the first polynomial-time algorithm to solve the three problems for arbitrary trees.