Approximating Min-Max (Regret) Versions of Some Polynomial Problems

While the complexity of min-max and min-max regret versions of most classical combinatorial optimization problems has been thoroughly investigated, there are very few studies about their approximation. For a bounded number of scenarios, we establish a general approximation scheme which can be used for min-max and min-max regret versions of some polynomial problems. Applying this scheme to shortest path and minimum spanning tree, we obtain fully polynomial-time approximation schemes with much better running times than the ones previously presented in the literature.