A Bottleneck Matching Problem with Edge-Crossing Constraints

Abstract

Motivated by a crane assignment problem, we consider a Euclidean bipartite matching problem with edge-crossing constraints. Specifically, given [Formula: see text] red points and [Formula: see text] blue points in the plane, we want to construct a perfect matching between red and blue points that minimizes the length of the longest edge, while imposing a constraint that no two edges may cross each other. We show that the problem cannot be approximately solved within a factor less than 1:277 in polynomial time unless [Formula: see text]. We give simple dynamic programming algorithms that solve our problem in two special cases, namely (1) the case where the red and blue points form the vertices of a convex polygon and (2) the case where the red points are collinear and the blue points lie to one side of the line through the red points.