Abstract
Given an edge-weighted transportation network G and a list of transportation requests L, the stacker crane problem is to find a minimum-cost tour for a server along the edges of G that serves all requests. The server has capacity one, and starts and stops at the same vertex. In this paper, we consider the case that the transportation network G is a tree, and that the requests are chosen randomly according to a certain class of probability distributions. We show that a polynomial time algorithm by Frederickson and Guan [11], which guarantees a 4/3-approximation in the worst case, on almost all inputs finds a minimum-cost tour, along with a certificate of the optimality of its output.
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Coja-Oghlan, A., Krumke, S.O., Nierhoff, T. (2003). A Heuristic for the Stacker Crane Problem on Trees Which Is Almost Surely Exact. In: Ibaraki, T., Katoh, N., Ono, H. (eds) Algorithms and Computation. ISAAC 2003. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2906. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24587-2_62
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24587-2_62
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