Abstract
The hypergraph minimum bisection (HMB) problem is the problem of partitioning the vertices of a hypergraph into two sets of equal size so that the total weight of hyperedges crossing the sets is minimized. HMB is an NP-hard problem that arises in numerous applications – for example, in digital circuit design. Although many heuristics have been proposed for HMB, there has been no known mathematical program that is equivalent to HMB. As a means of shedding light on HMB, we study the equivalent, complement problem of HMB (called CHMB), which attempts to maximize the total weight of non-crossing hyperedges. We formulate CHMB as a quadratically constrained quadratic program, considering its semidefinite programming relaxation and providing computational results on digital circuit partitioning benchmark problems. We also provide results towards an approximation guarantee for CHMB.
Acknowledgement
Research by S. Burer was supported in part by NSF Grants CCR-0203426 and CCF-0545514.