The Depth-Restricted Rectilinear Steiner Arborescence Problem is NP-complete

TL;DR

This paper proves that a restricted version of the rectilinear Steiner arborescence problem, with depth constraints for terminals, remains NP-hard, highlighting its computational complexity.

Contribution

It introduces a depth-restricted variant of the rectilinear Steiner arborescence problem and proves its NP-hardness, extending understanding of its computational difficulty.

Findings

Depth-restricted problem is NP-hard.

Even with depth constraints, the problem remains computationally intractable.

The result extends NP-hardness to more restricted problem variants.

Abstract

In the rectilinear Steiner arborescence problem the task is to build a shortest rectilinear Steiner tree connecting a given root and a set of terminals which are placed in the plane such that all root-terminal-paths are shortest paths. This problem is known to be NP-hard. In this paper we consider a more restricted version of this problem. In our case we have a depth restrictions $d(t)\in\mathbb{N}$ for every terminal $t$. We are looking for a shortest binary rectilinear Steiner arborescence such that each terminal $t$ is at depth $d(t)$, that is, there are exactly $d(t)$ Steiner points on the unique root-$t$-path is exactly $d(t)$. We prove that even this restricted version is NP-hard.