Donation Center Location Problem

We introduce and study the donation center location problem, which has an additional application in network testing and may also be of independent interest as a general graph-theoretic problem. Given a set of agents and a set of centers, where agents have preferences over centers and centers have capacities, the goal is to open a subset of centers and to assign a maximum-sized subset of agents to their most-preferred open centers, while respecting the capacity constraints. We prove that in general, the problem is hard to approximate within n1/2−ǫ for any ǫ > 0. In view of this, we investigate two special cases. In one, every agent has a bounded number of centers on her preference list, and in the other, all preferences are induced by a line-metric. We present constant-factor approximation algorithms for the former and exact polynomial-time algorithms for the latter. Of particular interest among our techniques are an analysis of the greedy algorithm for a variant of the maximum c...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: FSTTCS
• Authors: Chien-Chung Huang, Zoya Svitkina
• Keywords: Center Location Problem, FSTTCS 2009, General Graph-theoretic Problem, Most-preferred Open Centers, Theoretical Computer Science