Survivable Network Design for Group Connectivity in Low-Treewidth Graphs

Abstract: In the Group Steiner Tree problem (GST), we are given a (vertex or edge)-weighted graph $G=(V,E)$ on $n$ vertices, a root vertex $r$ and a collection of groups ${S_i}_{i\in[h]}: S_i\subseteq V(G)$. The goal is to find a min-cost subgraph $H$ that connects the root to every group. We consider a fault-tolerant variant of GST, which we call Restricted (Rooted) Group SNDP. In this setting, each group $S_i$ has a demand $k_i\in[k],k\in\mathbb N$, and we wish to find a min-cost $H\subseteq G$ such that, for each group $S_i$, there is a vertex in $S_i$ connected to the root via $k_i$ (vertex or edge) disjoint paths. While GST admits $O(\log² n\log h)$ approximation, its high connectivity variants are Label-Cover hard, and for the vertex-weighted version, the hardness holds even when $k=2$. Previously, positive results were known only for the edge-weighted version when $k=2$ [Gupta et al., SODA 2010; Khandekar et al., Theor. Comput. Sci., 2012] and for a relaxed variant where the disjoint paths may end at different vertices in a group [Chalermsook et al., SODA 2015]. Our main result is an $O(\log n\log h)$ approximation for Restricted Group SNDP that runs in time $n^{f(k, w)}$, where $w$ is the treewidth of $G$. This nearly matches the lower bound when $k$ and $w$ are constant. The key to achieving this result is a non-trivial extension of the framework in [Chalermsook et al., SODA 2017], which embeds all feasible solutions to the problem into a dynamic program (DP) table. However, finding the optimal solution in the DP table remains intractable. We formulate a linear program relaxation for the DP and obtain an approximate solution via randomized rounding. This framework also allows us to systematically construct DP tables for high-connectivity problems. As a result, we present new exact algorithms for several variants of survivable network design problems in low-treewidth graphs.