Minimum weight pseudo-triangulations

We consider the problem of computing a minimum weight pseudo-triangulation of a set of n points in the plane. We first present an -time algorithm that produces a pseudo-triangulation of weight which is shown to be asymptotically worst-case optimal, i.e., there exists a point set for which every pseudo-triangulation has weight , where is the weight of a minimum weight spanning tree of . We also present a constant factor approximation algorithm running in cubic time. In the process we give an algorithm that produces a minimum weight pseudo-triangulation of a simple polygon.