Connectivity interdiction

We consider the problem of maximally decreasing the edge-connectivity of an edge-weighted graph by removing a limited set of edges. This problem, which we term connectivity interdiction, falls into a large family of so-called interdiction problems, which have been considered in a variety of contexts. Whereas little is known about the approximability of most interdiction problems, we show that connectivity interdiction admits a PTAS, and a natural special case of it can even be solved efficiently. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.