A strongly polynomial FPTAS for the symmetric quadratic knapsack problem

The symmetric quadratic knapsack problem (SQKP), which has several applications in machine scheduling, is NP-hard. An approximation scheme for this problem is known to achieve an approximation ratio of (1+ϵ) for any ϵ>0. To ensure a polynomial time complexity, this approximation scheme needs an input of a lower bound and an upper bound on the optimal objective value, and requires the ratio of the bounds to be bounded by a polynomial in the size of the problem instance. However, such bounds are not mentioned in any previous literature. In this paper, we present the first such bounds and develop a polynomial time algorithm to compute them. The bounds are applied, so that we have obtained for problem (SQKP) a fully polynomial time approximation scheme (FPTAS) that is also strongly polynomial time, in the sense that the running time is bounded by a polynomial only in the number of integers in the problem instance.