Node-Weighted Prize Collecting Steiner Tree and Applications

I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. ii The Steiner Tree problem has appeared in the Karp’s list of the first 21 NP-hard problems and is well known as one of the most fundamental problems in Network Design area. We study the Node-Weighted version of the Prize Collecting Steiner Tree problem. In this problem, we are given a simple graph with a cost and penalty value associated with each node. Our goal is to find a subtree T of the graph minimizing the cost of the nodes in T plus penalty of the nodes not in T. By a reduction from set cover problem it can be easily shown that the problem cannot be approximated in polynomial time within factor of (1 − o(1)) lnn unless NP has quasi-polynomial time algorithms, where n is the number of vertices of the graph. Moss and Rabani claimed an O(log n)-approximation algorithm for the problem usin