Volume 36, Number 1, 59-73, DOI: 10.1007/s00453-002-1006-1

Maintenance of a Piercing Set for Intervals with Applications

Katz, Nielsen and Segal

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Abstract

We show how to maintain efficiently a minimum piercing set for a set S of intervals on the line, under insertions and deletions to/from S. A linear-size dynamic data structure is presented, which enables us to compute a new minimum piercing set following an insertion or deletion in time O(c( S) log |S|), where c (S) is the size of the new minimum piercing set. We also show how to maintain a piercing set for S of size at most (1+ɛ)c (S), for 0 < ɛ ≤ 1 , in [`(O)]\bar O ((log |S|)/ɛ) amortized time per update. We then apply these results to obtain efficient solutions to the following three problems: (i) the shooter location problem, (ii) computing a minimum piercing set for arcs on a circle, and (iii) dynamically maintaining a box cover for a d -dimensional point set.

Keywords  Geometric optimization, Piercing set, Dynamic algorithms.