Polynomial-Time Approximation Schemes for k-center, k-median, and Capacitated Vehicle Routing in Bounded Highway Dimension

The concept of bounded highway dimension was developed to capture observed properties of road networks. We show that a graph of bounded highway dimension with a distinguished root vertex can be embedded into a graph of bounded treewidth in such a way that u-to-v distance is preserved up to an additive error of epsilon times the u-to-root plus v-to-root distances. We show that this embedding yields a PTAS for Bounded-Capacity Vehicle Routing in graphs of bounded highway dimension. In this problem, the input specifies a depot and a set of clients, each with a location and demand; the output is a set of depot-to-depot tours, where each client is visited by some tour and each tour covers at most Q units of client demand. Our PTAS can be extended to handle penalties for unvisited clients. We extend this embedding result to handle a set S of root vertices. This result implies a PTAS for Multiple Depot Bounded-Capacity Vehicle Routing: the tours can go from one depot to another. The embedding result also implies that, for fixed k, there is a PTAS for k-Center in graphs of bounded highway dimension. In this problem, the goal is to minimize d so that there exist k vertices (the centers) such that every vertex is within distance d of some center. Similarly, for fixed k, there is a PTAS for k-Median in graphs of bounded highway dimension. In this problem, the goal is to minimize the sum of distances to the k centers.

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