Capacitated Domination Problem

Abstract

We consider a generalization of the well-known domination problem on graphs. The (soft) capacitated domination problem with demand constraints is to find a dominating set D of minimum cardinality satisfying both the capacity and demand constraints. The capacity constraint specifies that each vertex has a capacity that it can use to meet the demand of dominated vertices in its closed neighborhood, and the number of copies of each vertex allowed in D is unbounded. The demand constraint specifies that the demand of each vertex in V is met by the capacities of vertices in D dominating it. In this paper, we study the capacitated domination problem on trees. We present a linear time algorithm for the unsplittable demand model, and a pseudo-polynomial time algorithm for the splittable demand model. In addition, we show that the capacitated domination problem on trees with splittable demand constraints is NP-complete (even for its integer version) and provide a 3/2-approximation algorithm. We also give a primal-dual approximation algorithm for the weighted capacitated domination problem with splittable demand constraints on general graphs.