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The Graham-Knowlton Problem Revisited

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Abstract

In the late 60s Graham and Knowlton introduced the WIP (wire identification problem) that affected electricians: match the wires in the ceiling to those in the basement while making the fewest trips. We revisit this problem and study its variants and generalizations; we provide a combinatorial characterization of the solution(s) in terms of an associated hypergraph and obtain nearly tight bounds on the minimum number of trips.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA

    Navin Goyal & S. Muthukrishnan

  2. Tata Research Development and Design Center, Pune, India

    Sachin Lodha

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  1. Navin Goyal
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  2. Sachin Lodha
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  3. S. Muthukrishnan
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Correspondence to Navin Goyal, Sachin Lodha or S. Muthukrishnan.

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Goyal, N., Lodha, S. & Muthukrishnan, S. The Graham-Knowlton Problem Revisited. Theory Comput Syst 39, 399–412 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-005-1242-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-005-1242-2

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