Approximation algorithm for the Multicovering Problem

Abstract

Let $\mathcal{H}=(V,\mathcal{E})$ be a hypergraph with maximum edge size $\ell$ and maximum degree $\Delta$. For given numbers $b_v\in \mathbb{N}_{\geq 2}$, $v\in V$, a set multicover in $\mathcal{H}$ is a set of edges $C \subseteq \mathcal{E}$ such that every vertex $v$ in $V$ belongs to at least $b_v$ edges in $C$. Set Multicover is the problem of finding a minimum-cardinality set multicover. Peleg, Schechtman and Wool conjectured that for any fixed $\Delta$ and $b:=\min_{v\in V}b_{v}$, the problem of \sbmultcov is not approximable within a ratio less than $\delta:=\Delta-b+1$, unless $\mathcal{P} =\mathcal{NP}$. Hence it's a challenge to explore for which classes of hypergraph the conjecture doesn't hold. We present a polynomial time algorithm for the Set Multicover problem which combines a deterministic threshold algorithm with conditioned randomized rounding steps. Our algorithm yields an approximation ratio of $ \max\left\{ \frac{148}{149}\delta, \left(1- \frac{ (b-1)e^{\frac{\delta}{4}}}{94\ell} \right)\delta \right\}$. Our result not only improves over the approximation ratio presented by Srivastav et al (Algorithmica 2016) but it's more general since we set no restriction on the parameter $\ell$. Moreover we present a further polynomial time algorithm with an approximation ratio of $\frac{5}{6}\delta$ for hypergraphs with $\ell\leq (1+\epsilon)\bar{\ell}$ for any fixed $\epsilon \in [0,\frac{1}{2}]$, where $\bar{\ell}$ is the average edge size. The analysis of this algorithm relies on matching/covering duality due to Ray-Chaudhuri (1960), which we convert into an approximative form. The second performance disprove the conjecture of peleg et al for a large subclass of hypergraphs.