Connectivity Constraints in Network Analysis

This dissertation establishes mathematical foundations of connectivity requirements arising in both abstract and geometric network analysis. Connectivity constraints are ubiquitous in network design and network analysis. Aside from the obvious applications in communication and transportation networks, they have also appeared in forest planning, political distracting, activity detection in video sequences and protein-protein interaction networks. Theoretically, connectivity constraints can be analyzed via polyhedral methods, in which we investigate the structure of (vertex)-connected subgraph polytope (CSP). One focus of this dissertation is on performing an extensive study of facets of CSP. We present the first systematic study of non-trivial facets of CSP. One advantage to study facets is that a facet-defining inequality is always among the tightest valid inequalities, so applying facet-defining inequalities when imposing connectivity constraints can guarantee good performance of the algorithm. We adopt lifting techniques to provide a framework to generate a wide class of facet-defining inequalities of CSP. We also derive the necessary and sufficient conditions when a vertex separator inequality, which plays a critical role in connectivity constraints, induces a facet of CSP. Another advantage to study facets is that CSP is uniquely determined by its facets, so full understanding of CSP's facets indicates full understanding of CSP itself. We are able to derive a full description of CSP for a wide class of graphs, including forest and several types of dense graphs, such as graphs with small independence number, s-plex with small s and s-defective cliques with small s. Furthermore, we investigate the relationship between lifting techniques, maximum weight connected subgraph problem and node-weight Steiner tree problem and study the computational complexity of generation of facet-defining inequalities. Another focus of this dissertation is to study connectivity in geometric network analysis. In geometric applications like wireless networks and communication networks, the concept of connectivity can be defined in various ways. In one case, connectivity is imposed by distance, which can be modeled by unit disk graphs (UDG). We create a polytime algorithm to identify large 2-clique in UDG; in another case when connectivity is based on visibility, we provide a generalization of the two-guard problem