Planar multifacility location problems with tree structure and finite dominating sets

Abstract

Multifacility location problems arise in many real world applications. Often, the facilities can only be placed in feasible regions such as development or industrial areas. In this paper we show the existence of a finite dominating set (FDS) for the planar multifacility location problem with polyhedral gauges as distance functions, and polyhedral feasible regions, if the interacting facilities form a tree. As application we show how to solve the planar 2-hub location problem in polynomial time. This approach will yield an ε-approximation for the Euclidean norm case which is polynomial in the input data and 1ε.