摘要:We demonstrate that the integrality gap of the natural cut-based LP relaxation for the directed Steiner tree problem is O(log k) in quasi-bipartite graphs with k terminals. Such instances can be seen to generalize set cover, so the integrality gap analysis is tight up to a constant factor. A novel aspect of our approach is that we use the primal-dual method; a technique that is rarely used in designing approximation algorithms for network design problems in directed graphs.
关键词:Approximation algorithm; Primal-Dual algorithm; Directed Steiner tree