Abstract not found

A fundamental facility location problem is to choose the location of facilities, such as industrial plants and warehouses, to minimize the cost of satisfying the demand for some commodity. There are associated costs for locating the facilities, as well as transportation costs for distributing the commodities. We assume that the transportation costs form a metric. This problem is commonly referred to as the uncapacitated facility location (UFL) problem. Applications to bank account location and clustering, as well as many related pieces of work, are discussed by Cornuejols, Nemhauser and Wolsey [2]. Recently, the first constant factor approximation algorithm for this problem was obtained by Shmoys, Tardos and Aardal [16]. We show that a simple greedy heuristic combined with the algorithm by Shmoys, Tardos and Aardal, can be used to obtain an approximation guarantee of 2.408. We discuss a few variants of the problem, demonstrating better approximation factors for restricted versions of the problem. We also show that the problem is Max SNP-hard. However, the inapproximability constants derived from the Max SNP hardness are very close to one. By relating this problem to Set Cover, we prove a lower bound of 1.463 on the best possible approximation ratio assuming NP / ∈ DT IME[n O(log log n)]. 1

Abstract not found

We present a simple and natural greedy algorithm for the metric uncapacitated facility location problem achieving an approximation guarantee of 1.61 whereas the best previously known was 1.73. Furthermore, we will show that our algorithm has a property which allows us to apply the technique of Lagrangian relaxation. Using this property, we can nd better approximation algorithms for many variants of the facility location problem, such as the capacitated facility location problem with soft capacities and a common generalization of the k-median and facility location problem. We will also prove a lower bound on the approximability of the k-median problem.

We present a natural greedy algorithm for the metric uncapacitated facility location problem and use the method of dual fitting to analyze its approximation ratio, which turns out to be 1.861. The running time of our algorithm is O(m log m), where m is the total number of edges in the underlying complete bipartite graph between cities and facilities. We use our algorithm to improve recent results for some variants of the problem, such as the fault tolerant and outlier versions. In addition, we introduce a new variant which can be seen as a special case of the concave cost version of this problem.

We initiate the design of approximation algorithms for stochastic combinatorial optimization problems; we formulate the problems in the framework of two-stage stochastic optimization, and provide nearly tight approximation algorithms. Our problems range from the simple (shortest path, vertex cover, bin packing) to complex (facility location, set cover), and contain representatives with different approximation ratios. The approximation ratio of the stochastic variant of a typical problem is of the same order of magnitude as its deterministic counterpart. Furthermore, common techniques for designing approximation algorithms such as LP rounding, the primal-dual method, and the greedy algorithm, can be carefully adapted to obtain these results. 1

) Moses Charikar Samir Khuller y David M. Mount z Giri Narasimhan x Abstract Facility location problems are traditionally investigated with the assumption that all the clients are to be provided service. A significant shortcoming of this formulation is that a few very distant clients, called outliers, can exert a disproportionately strong influence over the final solution. In this paper we explore a generalization of various facility location problems (K-center, K-median, uncapacitated facility location etc) to the case when only a specified fraction of the customers are to be served. What makes the problems harder is that we have to also select the subset that should get service. We provide generalizations of various approximation algorithms to deal with this added constraint. 1 Introduction The facility location problem and the related clustering problems, k-median and k-center, are widely studied in operations research and computer science [3, 7, 22, 24, 32]. Typically in...

In the Universal Facility Location problem we are given a set of demand points and a set of facilities.

k-median problem, butour approach does not yield a polynomial time algorithm with this guarantee. We also give a new simple proof of the performance guarantee of the Mettu-Plaxtonalgorithm using LP duality, which suggests a minor modification of the algorithm that makes it Lagrangian-multiplier preserving.

Multicommodity facility location refers to the extension of facility location to allow for different clients having demand for different goods, from among a finite set of goods. This leads to several optimization problems, depending on the costs of opening facilities (now a function of the commodities it serves). In this paper, we introduce and study some variants of multicommodity facility location, and provide approximation algorithms and hardness results for them.