On the Complexity of Reconfiguration Problems [chapter]

Takehiro Ito, Erik D. Demaine, Nicholas J. A. Harvey, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Martha Sideri, Ryuhei Uehara, Yushi Uno
2008 Lecture Notes in Computer Science  
Reconfiguration problems arise when we wish to find a step-by-step transformation between two feasible solutions of a problem such that all intermediate results are also feasible. We demonstrate that a host of reconfiguration problems derived from NP-complete problems are PSPACE-complete, while some are also NP-hard to approximate. In contrast, several reconfiguration versions of problems in P are solvable in polynomial time.
doi:10.1007/978-3-540-92182-0_6 fatcat:krdjr2lw25az3oflwqhssobmuy