About fully polynomial approximability of the generalized knapsack problem

The generalized knapsack problem, or gknap is the combinatorial optimization problem of optimizing a nonnegative linear functional over the integral hull of the intersection of a polynomially separable 0 - 1 polytope and a knapsack constraint. Among many potential applications, the knapsack, the restricted shortest path, and the restricted spanning tree problem are such examples. We establish some necessary and sufficient conditions for a gknap to admit a fully polynomial approximation scheme, or FPTAS, To do so, we recapture the scaling and approximate binary search techniques in the framework of gknap. This also enables us to find a condition that a gknap does not have an FP-TAS. This condition is more general than the strong NP-hardness.