## Budgeted Maximal Graph Coverage

Please always quote using this URN: urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-6918
• An instance of the \emph{maximum coverage} problem is given by a set of weighted ground elements and a cost weighted family of subsets of the ground element set. The goal is to select a subfamily of total cost of at most that of a given budget maximizing the weight of the covered elements. We formulate the problem on graphs: In this situation the set of ground elements is specified by the nodes of a graph, while the family of covering sets is restricted to connected subgraphs. We show that on general graphs the problem is polynomial time solvable if restricted to sets of size at most~$2$, but becomes NP-hard if sets of size~$3$ are permitted. On trees, we prove polynomial time solvability if each node appears in a fixed number of sets. In contrast, if vertices are allowed to appear an unbounded number of times, the problem is NP-hard even on stars. We finally give polynomial time algorithms for special cases where the subgraphs form paths and the host graph is a line, a cycle or a star.