Faster algorithms for orienteering and k-TSP.

We consider the rooted orienteering problem in Euclidean space: Given n points P in R d , a root point s ∈ P and a budget B > 0 , find a path that starts from s , has total length at most B , and visits as many points of P as possible. This problem is known to be NP-hard, hence we study (1 − δ) -approximation algorithms. The previous Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme (PTAS) for this problem, due to Chen and Har-Peled (2008), runs in time n O (d d / δ) 2 (d / δ) O (d) , and improving on this time bound was left as an open problem. Our main contribution is a PTAS with a significantly improved time complexity of n O (1 / δ) 2 (d / δ) O (d) . A known technique for approximating the orienteering problem is to reduce it to solving 1 / δ correlated instances of rooted k -TSP (a k -TSP tour is one that visits at least k points). However, the k -TSP tours in this reduction must achieve a certain excess guarantee (namely, their length can surpass the optimum length only in proportion to a parameter of the optimum called excess) that is stronger than the usual (1 + δ) -approximation. Our main technical contribution is to improve the running time of these k -TSP variants, particularly in its dependence on the dimension d. Indeed, our running time is polynomial even for a moderately large dimension, roughly up to d = O (log ⁡ log ⁡ n) instead of d = O (1). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]