Fault-tolerant facility location

We consider a fault-tolerant generalization of the classical uncapacitated facility location problem, where each client j has a requirement that rj distinct facilities serve it, instead of just one. We give a 2.076-approximation algorithm for this problem using LP rounding, which is currently the best known performance guarantee. Our algorithm exploits primal and dual complementary slackness conditions and is based on clustered randomized rounding. A technical difficulty that we overcome is the presence of terms with negative coefficients in the dual objective function, which makes it difficult to bound the cost in terms of the dual variables. For the case where all requirements are the same, we give a primal-dual

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: SODA
• Authors: Chaitanya Swamy, David B. Shmoys
• Keywords: Algorithms, Dual Complementary Slackness, Dual Objective Function, Facility Location Problem, SODA 2003