On the Average Taxicab Distance Function and Its Applications

Abstract

Generalized conics are subsets in the space all of whose points have the same average distance from a given set of points (focal set). The function measuring the average distance is called the average distance function (or the generalized conic function). In general it is a convex function satisfying a kind of growth condition as the preliminary results of Sect. 2 show. Therefore any sublevel set is convex and compact. We can also conclude that such a function has a global minimizer.