Sequential and Parallel Algorithms for Mixed Packing and Covering

Abstract

Mixed packing and covering problems are problems that can be formulated as linear programs using only non-negative coefficients. Examples include multicommodity network flow, the Held-Karp lower bound on TSP, fractional relaxations of set cover, bin-packing, knapsack, scheduling problems, minimum-weight triangulation, etc. This paper gives approximation algorithms for the general class of problems. The sequential algorithm is a simple greedy algorithm that can be implemented to find an epsilon-approximate solution in O(epsilon^-2 log m) linear-time iterations. The parallel algorithm does comparable work but finishes in polylogarithmic time. The results generalize previous work on pure packing and covering (the special case when the constraints are all "less-than" or all "greater-than") by Michael Luby and Noam Nisan (1993) and Naveen Garg and Jochen Konemann (1998).