Abstract
American cities, especially their central regions usually have a very regular street pattern: We are given a rectangular grid of streets, each street has to be labeled with a name running along its street, such that no two labels overlap. For this restricted but yet realistic case an efficient algorithmic solution for the generally hard labeling problem gets in reach.
The main contribution of this paper is an algorithm that guarantees to solve every solvable instance. In our experiments the running time is polynomial without a single exception. On the other hand the problem was recently shown to be NP-hard.
Finally, we present efficient algorithms for three special cases including the case of having no labels that are more than half the length of their street.
This work was partially supported by grants from the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Science (Projects ESPRIT IV LTR No. 21957 CGAL and No. 28155 GALIA), and by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant “Combinatorics and Geometry”).
Frank Wagner is a Heisenberg-Stipendiat of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, grant Wa1066/1
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Neyer, G., Wagner, F. (2000). Labeling Downtown. In: Bongiovanni, G., Petreschi, R., Gambosi, G. (eds) Algorithms and Complexity. CIAC 2000. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 1767. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46521-9_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-46521-9_10
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