The Balanced Facility Location Problem: Complexity and Heuristics

In a recent work, Schmitt and Singh propose a new quadratic facility location model to address ecological challenges faced by policymakers in Bavaria, Germany. Building on this previous work, we significantly extend our understanding of this new problem. We develop connections to traditional combinatorial optimization models and show the problem is NP-hard. We then develop … Read more

Navigating Concave Regions in Continuous Facility Location Problems

In prior literature regarding facility location problems, there has been little explicit acknowledgement of problems arising from concave (non-convex) regions. By extension, there is a distinct deficiency in existing methods to deal with them outside of problem relaxation. In this work, we present a novel algorithm for finding representative regional center-points, referred to as “Concave … Read more

Reliable p-median facility location problem: two-stage robust models and algorithms

In this paper, we propose a set of two-stage robust optimization models to design reliable p-median facility location networks subject to disruptions. A customized column-and- constraint generation approach is implemented and shown to be more effective than Benders cutting plane method. Numerical experiments are performed on real data and management insights on system design are … Read more

A 1.52-Approximation Algorithm for the Uncapacitated Facility Location Problem

In this note we present an improved approximation algorithm for the (uncapacitated) metric facility location problem. This algorithm uses the idea of cost scaling, the greedy algorithm of \cite{JMS}, and the greedy augmentation procedure of \cite{CG,GK}. Citation Working Paper, MIT and the University of Iowa Article Download View A 1.52-Approximation Algorithm for the Uncapacitated Facility … Read more