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Greedy Strikes Back: Improved Facility Location Algorithms by Sudipto Guha; Samir Khuller is a Computer Science article available to read on EtoBox.

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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 problem. Application to bank account location and clustering, as well as many related pieces of work, are discussed by Cornuejols, Nemhauser, and Wolsey. Recently, the first constant factor approximation algorithm for this problem was obtained by Shmoys, Tardos, and Aardal. 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

Who reads Greedy Strikes Back: Improved Facility Location Algorithms?

Author

Sudipto Guha; Samir Khuller

Publisher

Elsevier Science; Elsevier ; Academic Press; Elsevier BV (ISSN 0196-6774)

Published

1999

Language

EN

Field

Computer Science (Physical Sciences)