%0 Journal Article %J Algorithms–ESA 2007 %D 2007 %T To fill or not to fill: the gas station problem %A Khuller, Samir %A Malekian,A. %A Mestre,J. %X In this paper we study several routing problems that generalize shortest paths and the Traveling Salesman Problem. We consider a more general model that incorporates the actual cost in terms of gas prices. We have a vehicle with a given tank capacity. We assume that at each vertex gas may be purchased at a certain price. The objective is to find the cheapest route to go from s to t, or the cheapest tour visiting a given set of locations. Surprisingly, the problem of find the cheapest way to go from s to t can be solved in polynomial time and is not NP-complete. For most other versions however, the problem is NP-complete and we develop polynomial time approximation algorithms for these versions. %B Algorithms–ESA 2007 %P 534 - 545 %8 2007/// %G eng %R 10.1007/978-3-540-75520-3_48