An Experimental Study about Efficiency of the Approximation Algorithms for Minimum Latency Problem

Minimum Latency Problem is a class of combinational optimization problems which have many practical applications. In general, the problem is proved to be NP-hard and unless P = NP, a polynomial time approximation scheme is unlikely to exist. Therefore, using approximation algorithm is a suitable approach for solving the problem. In recent times, several approximation algorithms were proposed. However, efficiency of the algorithms was only evaluated in a theoretical manner. They did not indicate real approximation ratio, running time in reality and there is a lack of comparison between the algorithms from experiments. In addition, quality of lower bound, which was an important part of the algorithms, was not mentioned. In an approach to fulfill these omissions, we implemented the algorithms on several test data to evaluate and compare real efficiency of them in terms of real ratio, running time and quality of lower bound.