G-2002-61
Design and Analysis of an Approximation Algorithm for Stackelberg Network Pricing
Sébastien Roch, Gilles Savard et Patrice Marcotte
We consider the problem of maximizing the revenue raised from tolls set on the arcs of a transportation network, under the constraint that users are assigned to toll-compatible shortest paths. We first prove that this problem is strongly NP-hard. We then provide a polynomial time algorithm with a worst-case precision guarantee of (1/2)log mT+1, where mT denotes the number of toll arcs. Finally we show that the approximation is tight with respect to a natural relaxation by constructing a family of instances for which the relaxation gap is reached.
Paru en novembre 2002 , 23 pages
Ce cahier a été révisé en mars 2003