  A pants decomposition of an orientable surface S is a collection of simple
cycles that partition S into pants, i.e., surfaces of genus zero with three
boundary cycles. Given a set P of n points in the plane, we consider the
problem of computing a pants decomposition of the surface S which is the plane
minus P, of minimum total length. We give a polynomial-time approximation
scheme using Mitchell's guillotine rectilinear subdivisions. We give a
quartic-time algorithm to compute the shortest pants decomposition of S when
the cycles are restricted to be axis-aligned boxes, and a quadratic-time
algorithm when all the points lie on a line; both exact algorithms use dynamic
programming with Yao's speedup.
