Partitioning a Weighted Tree to Subtrees of Almost Uniform Size

Abstract

Assume that each vertex of a graph G is assigned a nonnegative integer weight and that l and u are integers such that 0 ≤ l ≤ u. One wishes to partition G into connected components by deleting edges from G so that the total weight of each component is at least l and at most u. Such an “almost uniform” partition is called an (l, u)-partition. We deal with three problems to find an (l, u)-partition of a given graph: the minimum partition problem is to find an (l, u)-partition with the minimum number of components; the maximum partition problem is defined analogously; and the p-partition problem is to find an (l, u)-partition with a given number p of components. All these problems are NP-hard even for series-parallel graphs, but are solvable for paths in linear time and for trees in polynomial time. In this paper, we give polynomial-time algorithms to solve the three problems for trees, which are much simpler and faster than the known algorithms.