Largest and Smallest Area Triangles on a Given Set of Imprecise Points

In this paper we study the following problem: we are given a set of imprecise points modeled as parallel line segments, and we wish to place a point on each line segment such that the resulting point set maximizes/minimizes the size of the largest/smallest area k-gon. We first study the problem for the case k = 3. We show that for a given set of parallel line segments of equal length the largest possible area triangle can be found in O(n log n) time, and for line segments of arbitrary length the problem can be solved in O(n) time. Also, we show that the smallest largest-area triangle can be found in O(n log n) time. As for finding smallest-area triangles, we show that finding the largest smallest-area triangle is NP-hard, but that the smallest possible area triangle for a set of arbitrary length parallel line segments can be found in O(n) time. Finally, we discuss to what extent our results can be generalized to larger values of k.