Greedy Strikes Back: Improved Facility Location Algorithms

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 ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: SODA
• Authors: Sudipto Guha, Samir Khuller
• Keywords: Algorithms, Constant Factor Approximation Algorithm, Facility Location Problem, SODA 1998, Transportation Costs