We study the Travelling Salesperson (TSP) and the Steiner Tree problem (STP) in graphs of low highway dimension. This graph parameter was introduced by Abraham et al. [SODA 2010] as a model for transportation networks, on which TSP and STP naturally occur for various applications in logistics.
It was previously shown [Feldmann et al. ICALP 2015] that these problems admit a quasi-polynomial time approximation scheme (QPTAS) on graphs of constant highway dimension.
We demonstrate that a significant improvement is possible in the special case when the highway dimension is 1, for which we present a fully-polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS). We also prove that STP is weakly 𝖭𝖯 -hard for these restricted graphs.
For TSP we show 𝖭𝖯 -hardness for graphs of highway dimension 6, which answers an open problem posed in [Feldmann et al. ICALP 2015].