Improved Approximation of the General Soft-Capacitated Facility Location Problem

Laurent Alfandari ()
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Laurent Alfandari: ESSEC Business School, Postal: Avenue Bernard Hirsch - B.P. 50105, 95021 CERGY-PONTOISE Cedex, FRANCE, http://www.essec.edu

No DR 05003, ESSEC Working Papers from ESSEC Research Center, ESSEC Business School

Abstract: An NP-hard variant of the single-source Capacitated Facility Location Problem is studied, where each facility is composed of a variable number of fixed-capacity production units. This problem, especially the metric case, has been recently studied in several papers. In this paper, we only consider the general problem where connection costs do not systematically satisfy the triangle inequality property. We show that an adaptation of the set covering greedy heuristic, where the sub-problem is approximately solved by a Fully Polynomial-Time Approximation Scheme based on cost scaling and dynamic programming, achieves a logarithmic approximation ratio of (1+ƒÕ)H(n) for the problem, where n is the number of clients to be served, and H is the harmonic series. This improves the previous bound of 2H(n) for this problem.

Keywords: Facility Location; Combinatorial optimization; Set Covering; Dynamic Programming; Approximation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C44 C61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2005-03
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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