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On the location of a tree-shaped facility

Conference ·
OSTI ID:36240

This paper considers the problem of locating a central facility on a tree network. The central facility takes the form of a subtree of the network, and provides service to several demand points located at nodes of the network. Two types of costs are involved in evaluating a given facility. The setup cost represents the cost of establishing the facility and is taken to be directly proportional to the total length of the facility. The transportation cost is the cost associated with the travel of customers to the facility. The objective function is to select a tree-shaped facility that will minimize the sum of the setup cost and the total transportation cost. We introduce a general model and a simple {open_quotes}bottom-up{close_quotes} dynamic programming algorithm for its solution. We then focus on the important class of covering problems, where the transportation cost of a customer to the serving facility is zero if the distance between the two is below a certain threshhold, and is equal to some penalty term otherwise. We improve upon the performance of existing methods, and present algorithms with subquadratic complexity.

OSTI ID:
36240
Report Number(s):
CONF-9408161--
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English