A Polynomial-Time $O(\sqrt{n})$-Approximation for Undirected Three-Terminal Reachability-Preserving Minimum Edge Cut

Abstract

We study the undirected three-terminal reachability-preserving minimum edge cut problem. The input is an undirected graph $G=(V,E)$ with nonnegative edge costs, two protected terminals $s_1,s_2$, and a target terminal $t$. The goal is to remove a minimum-cost edge set so that $t$ is disconnected from the protected terminals while $s_1$ and $s_2$ remain connected. This problem captures a basic tension between separation and connectivity preservation. Prior work on connectivity-preserving cuts established polynomial-time solvability for some special cases, such as planar edge-cut instances, and strong hardness for node-cut variants, but a general-graph approximation guarantee for the undirected three-terminal edge-cut version does not appear to have been known. We give a polynomial-time $O(\sqrt{n})$-approximation algorithm in this paper. This is the first known approximation algorithm for the problem