A General Framework for Designing Approximation Schemes for Combinatorial Optimization Problems with Many Objectives Combined in

Abstract. In this paper, we propose a general framework for designing fully polynomial time approximation schemes for combinatorial optimization problems, in which more than one objective function are combined into one using any norm. The main idea is to exploit the approximate Pareto-optimal frontier for multi-criteria optimization problems. Using this approach, we obtain an FPTAS for a novel resource allocation problem, for the problem of scheduling jobs on unrelated parallel machines, and for the Santa Claus problem, when the number of agents/machines is fixed, for any norm, including the l-norm. Moreover, either FPTAS can be implemented in a manner so that the space requirements are polynomial in all input parameters. We also give approximation algorithms and hardness results for the resource allocation problem when the number of agents is not fixed.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: APPROX
• Authors: Shashi Mittal, Andreas S. Schulz
• Keywords: Algorithms, APPROX 2008, Optimization Problems, Polynomial Time Approximation, Resource Allocation Problem