Length-Constrained Network Design in Planar Digraphs

2026-07-28

AI Summary

This work addresses the length-bounded Directed Steiner Tree (DST) and Directed Steiner Forest (DSF) problems in planar directed graphs, where the goal is to find a minimum-cost subgraph connecting specified terminals while ensuring that all source–terminal paths respect a given length bound. The authors present the first bicriteria polylogarithmic approximation algorithm for these problems, which violates the length constraint by only an $O(\log k)$ factor—where $k$ denotes the number of terminals—while achieving an approximation ratio comparable to that of the unconstrained versions. Leveraging structural properties of planar graphs, the algorithm integrates tree embeddings, hierarchical decomposition, and dynamic programming. It further extends to the buy-at-bulk variant, overcoming longstanding barriers to approximability for such length-constrained network design problems in general directed graphs.

Abstract

We study length-constrained generalizations of Directed Steiner Tree (DST) and Directed Steiner Forest (DSF) in planar digraphs. In both problems, the input is a directed graph with edge costs. DST asks for a min-cost subgraph connecting a root to a given set of terminals, and DSF asks for a min-cost subgraph connecting each of a given set of source-sink terminal pairs. In the length-constrained setting, each edge has both a cost and a length, and the input includes a length bound $h$; the goal is to find a min-cost subgraph connecting each terminal pair via a path of length at most $h$. Our work is motivated by a recent line of results showing that several network design problems that are traditionally hard in directed graphs admit polylogarithmic approximation ratios in planar digraphs. We give polylogarithmic bicriteria approximation algorithms for length-constrained analogues of DST and DSF in planar digraphs. Our approximation ratios match the best known for DST and DSF in planar digraphs, with an $O(\log k)$ violation of the length constraint, where $k$ denotes the number of terminals (or terminal pairs). As corollaries, we obtain polylogarithmic approximations for buy-at-bulk DST and DSF in planar digraphs.

Problem

• Length-Constrained
• Directed Steiner Tree
• Directed Steiner Forest
• Planar Digraphs
• Network Design

Innovation

• length-constrained
• planar digraphs
• Directed Steiner Tree
• bicriteria approximation
• polylogarithmic approximation