Computation of lower tolerances of combinatorial bottleneck problems

Abstract

This paper considers the computation of lower tolerances of combinatorial optimization problems with an objective of type bottleneck, in which the objective is to minimize the element with maximum cost of a feasible solution. A lower tolerance can be defined as the supremum decrease such that the objective value remains the same. We develop a computational approach for generic problems with objective of type bottleneck and two specific approaches for the Linear Bottleneck Assignment Problem and the Bottleneck Shortest Path Problem, which have a similar complexity as solution approaches for these two problems. Finally, we present some experimental results on random instances for these problems.