IIMB Management Review

Journal of Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

Easy with Difficulty Objective Functions for Max Cut

Prof. S Thomas McCormick, M Rammohan Rao and Giovanni Rinald
2002
Working Paper No
204
Body

 

This note investigates the boundary between polynomially-solvable Max Cut and NP Hard Max Cut instances when they are classified only on the basis of the sign pattern of the objective function coefficients, i.e., of the orthant containing the objective function vector. It turns out that the matching number of the subgraph induced by the positive edges is the key parameter that allows us to differentiate between polynomially-solvable and hard instances of the problem. We give some applications of the polynomially solvable cases.

Key words
Objective Functions
wp.iimb_.204.pdf (1.13 MB)

Easy with Difficulty Objective Functions for Max Cut

Author(s) Name: Prof. S Thomas McCormick, M Rammohan Rao and Giovanni Rinald, 2002
Working Paper No : 204
Abstract:

 

This note investigates the boundary between polynomially-solvable Max Cut and NP Hard Max Cut instances when they are classified only on the basis of the sign pattern of the objective function coefficients, i.e., of the orthant containing the objective function vector. It turns out that the matching number of the subgraph induced by the positive edges is the key parameter that allows us to differentiate between polynomially-solvable and hard instances of the problem. We give some applications of the polynomially solvable cases.

Keywords: Objective Functions
wp.iimb_.204.pdf (1.13 MB)