Author:
Christine Markarian
Affiliation:
Department of Engineering and Information Technology, University of Dubai, Dubai, U.A.E.
Keyword(s):
Facility Location Problem, Service-installation Costs, Online Algorithms, Competitive Analysis, Randomized Rounding.
Abstract:
In this paper, we study the non-metric Online Facility Location with Service Installation Costs problem (OFL-SIC), an extension of the well-known non-metric Online Facility Location problem. In OFL-SIC, we are given a set of facilities, a set of services, and a set of requests arriving over time. Each request is composed of a subset of the services. Facilities are enabled to offer a subset of the services when being opened and an algorithm has to ensure that each arriving request is connected to a set of open facilities jointly offering the requested services. Opening a facility incurs an opening cost and for each offered service, there is a service installation cost that needs to be paid if the algorithm decides to install the service at the facility. Connecting a request to an open facility incurs a connecting cost, which is equal to the distance between the request and the facility. The goal is to minimize the total opening, service installation, and connecting costs. We propose t
he first online algorithm for non-metric OFL-SIC and show that it is asymptotically optimal under the standard notion of competitive analysis which is used to evaluate the performance of online algorithms.
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