The Chinese deliveryman problem

Martijn Ee () and René Sitters ()
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Martijn Ee: Netherlands Defence Academy
René Sitters: Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

4OR, 2020, vol. 18, issue 3, No 3, 356 pages

Abstract: Abstract We introduce the Chinese deliveryman problem where the goal of the deliveryman is to visit every house in his neighborhood such that the average time of arrival is minimized. We show that, in contrast to the well-known Chinese postman problem, the Chinese deliveryman problem is APX-hard in general and NP-hard for planar graphs. We give a simple $$\sqrt{2}$$ 2 -approximation for undirected graphs and a 4 / 3-approximation for 2-edge connected graphs. We observe that there is a PTAS for planar graphs and that depth first search is optimal for trees.

Keywords: Chinese deliveryman problem; Approximation algorithms; Computational complexity; Chinese postman problem; Graph search; 90C27; 68Q17; 90C59 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
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DOI: 10.1007/s10288-019-00420-2

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