Crown reductions for the Minimum Weighted Vertex Cover problem

The paper studies crown reductions for the Minimum Weighted Vertex Cover problem introduced recently in the unweighted case by Fellows et al. ([20], [1]). We describe in detail a close relation of crown reductions to Nemhauser and Trotter reductions that are based on the linear programming relaxation of the problem. We introduce and study the so called strong crown reductions, suitable for finding (or counting) all minimum vertex covers, or finding a minimum vertex cover under some additional constraints. It is described how crown decompositions and strong crown decompositions suitable for such problems can be computed in polynomial time. For weighted König-Egerváry graphs (G, w) we observe that the set of vertices belonging to all minimum vertex covers, and the set of vertices belonging to no minimum vertex covers, can be efficiently computed. Further, for some specific classes of graphs, simple algorithms for the Min-VC problem with a constant approximation factor r < 2 are provided. On the other hand, we conclude that for the regular graphs, or for the Hamiltonian connected graphs, the problem is as hard to approximate as for general graphs. It is demonstrated how the results about strong crown reductions can be used to achieve a linear size problem kernel for some related vertex cover problems.