Survivable Network, Linear Programming Relaxations and the Parsimonious Property

We consider the survivable network design problem - the problem of designing, at minimum cost, a network with edge-connectivity requirements. As special cases, this problem encompasses the Steiner tree problem, the traveling salesman problem and the k-connected network design problem. We establish a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Goemans, Michel X., Bertsimas, Dimitris J.
Format: Working Paper
Language:en_US
Published: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Operations Research Center 2004
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/5175
Description
Summary:We consider the survivable network design problem - the problem of designing, at minimum cost, a network with edge-connectivity requirements. As special cases, this problem encompasses the Steiner tree problem, the traveling salesman problem and the k-connected network design problem. We establish a property, referred to as the parsimonious property, of the linear programming (LP) relaxation of a classical formulation for the problem. The parsimonious property has numerous consequences. For example, we derive various structural properties of these LP relaxations, we present some algorithmic improvements and we perform tight worstcase analyses of two heuristics for the survivable network design problem.