Min-Cost Partitioning on a Tree Structure and Applications

We introduce a generalization of the min-cut partitioning problem, called Min-Cost Tree Partitioning, in which the nodes of an hypergraph G are to be mapped on to the vertices of a tree structure T, and the cost function to be minimized is the cost of routing the hyperedges (i.e., the nets) of G on the edges of T. We discuss several interesting VLSI design applications for this problem. We describe an iterative improvement heuristic for solving this problem.