Algorithms for the thief orienteering problem on directed acyclic graphs

Abstract

We consider the scenario of routing an agent called a thief through a weighted graph $G=(V,E)$ from a start vertex s to an end vertex t. A set I of items each with weight $w_i$ and profit $p_i$ is distributed among $V\setminus \{s,t\}$. The thief, who has a knapsack of capacity W, must follow a simple path from s to t within a given time T while packing in the knapsack a set of items taken from the vertices along the path of total weight at most W and maximum profit. The travel time across an edge depends on the edge length and current knapsack load.

The thief orienteering problem (ThOP) is a generalization of the orienteering problem, the longest path problem, and the 0-1 knapsack problem. We prove that there exists no approximation algorithm for ThOP with constant approximation ratio unless $\text{P}=\text{NP}$, and we present a polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS) for a relaxed version of ThOP when G is directed and acyclic that produces solutions that use time at most $T(1+ϵ)$ for any constant $ϵ>0$. We also present a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for ThOP on arbitrary undirected graphs where the travel time depends only on the lengths of the edges and T is the length of a shortest path from s to t plus a constant K. Finally, we present a FPTAS for a restricted version of the problem where the input graph is a clique.