Domination analysis of combinatorial optimization problems

We use the notion of domination ratio introduced by Glover and Punnen in 1997 to present a new classification of combinatorial optimization (CO) problems: DOM-easy and DOM-hard problems. It follows from results already proved in the 1970s that min TSP (both symmetric and asymmetric versions) is DOM-easy. We prove that several CO problems are DOM-easy including weighted max k-SAT and max cut. We show that some other problems, such as max clique and min vertex cover, are DOM-hard unless P = NP. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.