Facility Location can be seen as a whole family of problems which have many obvious applications in economics. They have been widely explored in the Operations Research community, from the viewpoints of approximation, heuristics, linear programming, etc. We add a new facet by initiating the study of some of these problems from a parametric point of view. Moreover, we exhibit some less obvious applications of these algorithms in the processing of semistructured documents and in computational biology.
Michael R. Fellows, Henning Fernau