Abstract
The field of supply chain management has been growing at a rapid pace in recent years, both as a research area and as a practical discipline. In this paper, we study the computational complexity of product covering problems in 3-tier supply chain models, and present natural complete problems for the classes W[3] and W[4] in parameterized complexity theory. This seems the first group of natural complete problems for higher levels in the parameterized intractability hierarchy (i.e., the W-hierarchy), and the first precise complexity characterizations of certain optimization problems in the research of supply chain management. Our results also derive strong computational lower bounds and inapproximability for these optimization problems.
This research is supported in part by US NSF under Grants CCR-0311590 and CCF-0430683 and by China NNSF Grants No. 60373083 and No. 60433020.
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Chen, J., Zhang, F. (2005). On Product Covering in Supply Chain Models: Natural Complete Problems for W[3] and W[4]. In: Megiddo, N., Xu, Y., Zhu, B. (eds) Algorithmic Applications in Management. AAIM 2005. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3521. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11496199_43
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11496199_43
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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