ALCOMFT-TR-03-96

Christoph Buchheim and Michael Jünger
An Integer Programming Approach to Fuzzy Symmetry Detection
Cologne. Work package 4. November 2003.

Abstract: The problem of exact symmetry detection in general graphs has received much attention recently. In spite of its NP-hardness, two different algorithms have been presented that in general can solve this problem quickly in practice. Hovever, as most graphs do not admit any exact symmetry at all, the much harder problem of fuzzy symmetry detection arises: a minimal number of certain modifications of the graph should be allowed in order to make it symmetric. We present a general approach to this problem: we allow arbitrary edge deletions and edge creations; every single modification can be given an individual weight. We apply integer programming techniques to solve this problem excatly or heuristically and give runtime results for a first implementation.

Postscript file: ALCOMFT-TR-03-96.ps.gz (93 kb).