A Polynomial-time Bicriteria Approximation Scheme for Planar Bisection

Given an undirected graph with edge costs and node weights, the minimum bisection problem asks for a partition of the nodes into two parts of equal weight such that the sum of edge costs between the parts is minimized. We give a polynomial time bicriteria approximation scheme for bisection on planar graphs. Specifically, let W be the total weight of all nodes in a planar graph G. For any constant ε > 0, our algorithm outputs a bipartition of the nodes such that each part weighs at most W/2 + ε and the total cost of edges crossing the partition is at most (1+ε) times the total cost of the optimal bisection. The previously best known approximation for planar minimum bisection, even with unit node weights, was ~O(log n). Our algorithm actually solves a more general problem where the input may include a target weight for the smaller side of the bipartition.