On the Approximability of the Traveling Salesman Problem with Line Neighborhoods

We study the variant of the Euclidean Traveling Salesman problem where instead of a set of points, we are given a set of lines as input, and the goal is to find the shortest tour that visits each line. The best known upper and lower bounds for the problem in ℝ^d, with d ≥ 3, are NP-hardness and an O(log³ n)-approximation algorithm which is based on a reduction to the group Steiner tree problem.
We show that TSP with lines in ℝ^d is APX-hard for any d ≥ 3. More generally, this implies that TSP with k-dimensional flats does not admit a PTAS for any 1 ≤ k ≤ d-2 unless P = NP, which gives a complete classification regarding the existence of polynomial time approximation schemes for these problems, as there are known PTASes for k = 0 (i.e., points) and k = d-1 (hyperplanes). We are able to give a stronger inapproximability factor for d = O(log n) by showing that TSP with lines does not admit a (2-ε)-approximation in d dimensions under the Unique Games Conjecture. On the positive side, we leverage recent results on restricted variants of the group Steiner tree problem in order to give an O(log² n)-approximation algorithm for the problem, albeit with a running time of n^{O(log log n)}.