FPTASsta

FPTASsta is a fictional open-source framework designed to support the development, evaluation, and comparison of Fully Polynomial Time Approximation Schemes (FPTAS) for combinatorial optimization problems. The project aims to provide a reproducible environment where researchers can implement FPTAS templates, tune the epsilon parameter, and benchmark performance across problem instances.

Architecture includes a modular core, problem plug-ins, an epsilon manager, a scaling and rounding layer, a dynamic programming backend, and an evaluation harness. The core exposes a well-documented API that allows adding new problems and templates without changing the rest of the system. The implementation favors portability, with a Python core and optional high-performance components in C++.

FPTASsta supports classic problems often addressed with FPTAS, such as the 0/1 knapsack problem, subset sum, and scheduling variants. It provides pre-built FPTAS templates that follow standard rounding approaches, along with utilities to compute the approximation guarantee and runtime estimates as a function of n and 1/epsilon.

The project emphasizes reproducibility and comparability. It includes dataset generators, a unit-test suite, and a benchmark suite that reports approximation ratios, running time, memory usage, and numerical stability. It encourages transparent reporting of epsilon values and implementation details.

FPTASsta is maintained by a community of researchers and students, distributed under an open-source license. It hosts documentation, tutorials, and example experiments to help newcomers understand how FPTAS techniques are implemented and evaluated.

See also: Fully Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme; Knapsack problem; Subset sum; Approximation algorithm.