An FPT Algorithm for Minimum Additive Spanner Problem

For a positive integer $t$ and a graph $G$, an additive $t$-spanner of $G$ is a spanning subgraph in which the distance between every pair of vertices is at most the original distance plus $t$. Minimum Additive $t$-Spanner Problem is to find an additive $t$-spanner with the minimum number of edges in a given graph, which is known to be NP-hard. Since we need to care about global properties of graphs when we deal with additive $t$-spanners, Minimum Additive $t$-Spanner Problem is hard to handle, and hence only few results are known for it. In this paper, we study Minimum Additive $t$-Spanner Problem from the viewpoint of parameterized complexity. We formulate a parameterized version of the problem in which the number of removed edges is regarded as a parameter, and give a fixed-parameter algorithm for it. We also extend our result to $(\alpha, \beta)$-spanners.