In this paper, we consider the colorful @math -center problem, which is a generalization of the well-known @math -center problem. Here, we are given red and blue points in a metric space, and a coverage requirement for each color. The goal is to find the smallest radius @math , such that with @math balls of radius @math , the desired number of points of each color can be covered. We obtain a constant approximation for this problem in the Euclidean plane. We obtain this result by combining a "pseudo-approximation" algorithm that works in any metric space, and an approximation algorithm that works for a special class of instances in the plane. The latter algorithm uses a novel connection to a certain matching problem in graphs.
Facility location with outliers, which is referred to as Robust Facility Location , is a generalization of the uncapacitated Facility Location problem; various constant approximations are known for the latter problem. The Robust Facility Location problem was introduced in @cite_11 , who gave a @math -approximation. The approximation guarantee was later improved by @cite_7 to @math .
@cite_7 @cite_11
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We present improved combinatorial approximation algorithms for the uncapacitated facility location problem. Two central ideas in most of our results are cost scaling and greedy improvement. We present a simple greedy local search algorithm which achieves an approximation ratio of @math in @math time. This also yields a bicriteria approximation tradeoff of @math for facility cost versus service cost which is better than previously known tradeoffs and close to the best possible. Combining greedy improvement and cost scaling with a recent primal-dual algorithm for facility location due to Jain and Vazirani, we get an approximation ratio of @math in @math time. This is very close to the approximation guarantee of the best known algorithm which is linear programming (LP)-based. Further, combined with the best known LP-based algorithm for facility location, we get a very slight improvement in the approximation factor for facility location, achieving @math . We also consider a variant of the capacitated facility location problem and present improved approximation algorithms for this. 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. 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 theuncapacitated facility locationproblem. 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 bound of 1.463 on the best possible approximation ratio, assumingNP?DTIMEnO(loglogn)]. In this paper we present a 1.52-approximation algorithm for the metric uncapacitated facility location problem, and a 2-approximation algorithm for the metric capacitated facility location problem with soft capacities. Both these algorithms improve the best previously known approximation factor for the corresponding problem, and our soft-capacitated facility location algorithm achieves the integrality gap of the standard linear programming relaxation of the problem. Furthermore, we will show, using a result of Thorup, that our algorithms can be implemented in quasi-linear time.